


asset

by painting



Series: Umbrella Academy [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Common Cold, Fever, Gen, Ghosts, Hurt/Comfort, Mission Fic, Working while sick trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2019-12-07 21:10:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18240218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/painting/pseuds/painting
Summary: As it turns out, "leave me alone, I'm sick" isn't an adequate deterrent when directed toward the livingorthe dead.





	1. bedroom {the request}

Klaus is three days into what is easily, undoubtedly, irrevocably and by a landslide the worst cold of his entire life.

He's fought plenty of them before, of course; he's only human. Sharing drinks and joints and beds with strangers has the potential to strengthen the immune system just as much as it does to spread any and all sorts of bugs that might be going around. The memories, at this point, are saturated in dreadful irony, because he has no idea where he could have caught it and this time he doesn't have the option to dull the edges of his symptoms further and further until they don't bother him anymore.

While this instance in particular is a doozy on its own, the reason it's so much worse is because, for the first time in nearly two decades, Klaus is present enough to _feel the entire thing_ in all of its miserable, scratchy glory. There's a heaviness in his limbs and what feels almost like a fog surrounding his consciousness, dampening his reflexes and coating him in fatigue, but the worst of it is in his head. It's terrible. His face hurts. It's become impossible to breathe through his nose, each and every facet of congestion overtaking not only ability to speak clearly but his overall sense of space and freedom.

With it exists a headache that comes and goes and a nagging, crackling cough that bubbles up from his chest and interrupts him any time he tries to use his vocal cords at all or even breathes the wrong way. Luther cringed when he heard it last night, saying it sounded painful (and not saying it sounded contagious, because he didn't need to; despite his authentic familial concern, self-preservation was also written all over his face) and Klaus confirmed that of course it was, because it never took too long before his chestbegan to ache. To top it all off, bright red cherry on his sundae of despair, his body also doesn't seem to mind him being too tired to keep up with needing to sneeze every fifteen minutes with a varying increase in frequency. It might be the least annoying of all of his cold's magnificent features, but even that had gotten old fast.

It's hardly a surprise that this virus is draining him. It's just doing its job; there's supposed to be a woefulness to falling ill. Unfortunately, it's all but depleted Klaus of the energy he needs to do just about anything with his powers, including both conjuring and manifesting the dead, and that, combined with his newfound commitment to sobriety, means he's fully out of commission and resolved to camp out only in a bed and on the couch until further notice.

Clearly, grieving spirits aren't interested in backing off for a few days just because Klaus isn't feeling well. Though they're as vivid as ever, he always tries not to acknowledge them because they often become even louder as they gain more confirmation that Klaus can see them. But clearing his throat and blowing his nose nonstop for nearly half a week has got his patience thin as a rail, and he's been doing his best to eloquently negotiate with them to convince them to give it a rest already, at least for the time being.

As it turns out, "leave me alone, I'm sick" isn't an adequate deterrent when directed toward the living _or_ the dead.

Klaus groans into his pillow and hopes that the person knocking on his door will get the message. Normally he'd welcome visitors, because being sick is boring and it's nice to have someone there to distract and ground him, but Klaus isn't feeling like himself and isn't up for entertaining. A few hours of wakefulness might put him more on his toes and ready to play, maybe even move around some to jumpstart his muscles and gain a bit of energy back, but seven in the morning following a flickering and restless sleep isn't the right time for any of that — or for anything in general.

"It's just me," says Vanya's sweet little voice, the same voice that he’s used to being accompanied by a fresh cup of water or a gentle touch. She's been bringing him these exciting spicy snacks from Little India to help him breathe better and sometimes staying for a couple of minutes to chat and tolerate Klaus prodding her for details about what she's been doing visiting Little India so often. She still hasn't given him a direct answer, but with a little more poking Klaus is sure she'll open up to him before his fever breaks. Vanya's company is fine.

"And me," says Five right behind her. Him Klaus isn't so sure about yet. "How are you feeling?"

Okay, so he's going to have to talk to them. Fine.

Klaus sighs and stretches, but doesn't open his eyes yet. "Well I…" is all he's able to croak out before he coughs twice, as lightly as possible while still scratching the itch in his throat because anything deeper might catch him in a fit that could go on for nearly half a minute. Nobody has that kind of time, and even if they did, there were a million ways it could be better spent than listening to Klaus battle with his bronchial tubes. " _Ohh._ I feel awesome."

"You still sound really stuffed up," Vanya says, her tone mostly fuzzy sympathy as she verbally brushes Klaus and his games aside. He can see her frown without having to look at her.

"I brought you some coffee," Five says.

Klaus cracks open his right eye and then his left, squinting because anything brighter than the inside of his eyelids feels positively blinding, then he pushes himself upright and takes the cup from his brother.

"Why…?" he says softly, trailing off on purpose to prompt Five to elaborate. He continues squinting, partly from the light and partly from confusion, while he sips the drink without tasting it.

Five's fearlessly standing in front of Vanya, his posture relaxed with one hand in his pocket and the other holding his own cup of coffee. "Well," he says, "do you remember Vincent Warner? Dad's old research partner. From the—"

"Haven't had the pleasure," answers Klaus. The coffee is doing something nice for his throat and he hopes it'll stick until he feels like getting out of bed to find another one in a few hours.

"—seventies. You weren't even born yet," Five says. "But you remember hearing about him…?"

"No," Klaus says. "Wait." He thinks about it through the looming storm clouds in his brain. "Uh, nope. Zilch and nada."

Five hums and says, "Okay. Well. I was going through some of Dad's things during some down time yesterday, some of the older files in his office that he'd probably been holding onto for archival reasons, but there really wasn't too much of interest until I got to his collaborative records. Turns out Warner had a team working for _him_ in his office after he and dad split. Gesundheit."

From behind the back of his wrist, Klaus sniffles and holds his cup higher, tipping it forward delicately as if he was saying _cheers_. "Thank you," he replies gallantly, tilting his chin down as he takes his hand away from the lower half of his face and then sets the coffee on the table next to him.

"Why did they split?" asks Vanya as Klaus sniffles again, and it's wet and thick and a nuisance. It doesn’t do much good.

"Don't know. And the team dissipated in the late eighties, but they kept correspondence with Dad up until the year all of us were born," Five says.

"So it wasn't because they were like… pissed off at each other or anything, then, right?" Klaus interprets. 

"Don't know that either," Five says confidently, like it doesn't bother him. "All we have are the dates. But I'm thinking…" He steps to the side and paces for a moment. "I'm thinking that looking further into it could provide some more clues about what they might have been looking at together, more details about the Umbrella Academy; about our powers. There might be something Warner knew that Dad didn't."

"Wow," says Vanya. Her characteristic slouch tightens up with attention. "That could be big."

"It could be," agrees Five.

"I genuinely," says Klaus, as emphatically as someone with five percent of their usual steam possibly can, " _genuinely_ am very impressed and excited and interested and whatever, truly, I really am, but I need to know why you had to come into my room and wake me up to deliver the _breaking news_ to me specifically."

Five could've tagged along with Vanya to say good morning or to deliver his own favorite drink to Klaus after he'd picked one up for him just because, but neither type of friendliness fits with any part of Five's M.O. Klaus knows there's a reason for it and he also knows he probably isn't going to like it.

"They converted Warner's old office into a single-family home not too long ago," Five announces.

"Uh-huh. So…?" Klaus says.

"So, coincidentally: a new family is going to be moving in tomorrow, after a two-year long period of vacancy."

"Jesus Christ Five _please_."

"We've only got today to get in and out without making a fuss or disrupting said family's lives," Five says. Klaus looks to Vanya seeking an impatience-based camaraderie, but all she's doing is frowning and looking nervous. "Now, the last family moved out for — _and I quote_ — 'superstitious reasons'."

"The report really said that?" asks Vanya.

"The report really said that," confirms Five. Instead of doing what he wants (which just happens to be jumping right out of his skin), Klaus gestures for him to hurry up. "I figured that's because Warner and two of his assistants died in the nineties—"

"Nope, nope, nope," Klaus declines immediately. He doesn't need to hear the rest; he knows his family well enough to predict what request is coming next, and he isn't interested. The nerve of them, he thinks to himself. Absolutely not. He flops back down into his bed and drags his hand down his face and then back up again. "No way, man. Sorry."

"Klaus, you're the only—"

"Uh, it's just not happening."

"—chance we have to even come close to—"

"Not today."

"Klaus, all we _have_ is today."

"So, okay," Klaus recaps, "you want to drag _me_ all the way to some haunted house on the dreariest day of the year to talk to a dead guy, while I'm the sickest I've ever been…"

"You have a bad cold," Five tells him. "You're not dying. You can bring whatever you need to feel comfortable on the drive up to Lloydtown."

"Whoa. No, no, no, no, no. You want to drag me _an hour away_ —"

"It's forty-five minutes away, if that."

Klaus groans. Who cares. "My powers don't work the right way when I'm sick," he says. "I can't see or hear anyone as well and if no one's home then we're going to be S.O.L., because there's not a snowball's chance in hell of me conjuring  _single_ lost-ass soul today. I'm serious. Like, the thought of even trying right now is making me wanna pass out."

"That's okay," Five says. "But we have to try. I'm fairly certain somebody will show up, anyway, if the report from the last family is anything to go by."

"And it has to be today," Klaus says, a bleary request for confirmation.

"Yes," Five says. "We really need your help on this one. I wouldn't be asking you right now if we didn't. When it's over you can rest all you want."

Klaus has always been good at reading people's compassion, and the sympathy in Five's voice is barely over the line of what he needs to say to be convincing. He was never very touchy-feely and maintained a guarded exterior for the most part, but his care for his siblings has always been authentic and worn proudly on his sleeve. Something inside of Klaus is reliably compelled to return the favor when it comes to things like that.

However, something else inside of Klaus is making him cold and hot and sensitive and achy and exhausted, so he says, "Can I please, _please_ try and sleep my headache off for another couple hours before we leave."

Though he's planning on doing it anyway because _fuck_ his brother's permission, Klaus is ready to add something about how much more useful he'll be if he's just a smidge more rested. If allowed the time, he could accompany the promise with a guilt trip woven out of reminders that his sleep tends to be erratic and fretful on the best of days, but he doesn't need to go to the trouble because Five instantly and easily answers, "Sure."

Klaus sighs hugely in devastating relief, but his breath snags and he ends up coughing again. Maybe it’ll drive the point home, if everything else hasn’t already.

"I'll tell Diego to get everything ready," Five says.

"Diego's going too?" Klaus asks in broken staccato while he makes a futile effort to wrangle his lungs.

Five nods. "He's the one who got a hold of the real estate records. From the police station."

Police station. What? Okay. Fine. Klaus nods back and sips on his coffee, sure that the caffeine won't keep him from falling back to sleep as soon as he shuts his eyes. It's always easier in the morning, without the momentum of an entire day churning behind him.

"I'll probably see you down there before you go," Vanya says. She turns around and heads for the door, her eyes reflecting the gratitude Five isn't inclined to express.

"Do you need anyone to wake you up?" Or maybe he's got his own way of doing it.

Klaus waves him off and says, "I'm fine. Don't worry your pretty little old man head over me and my _imperative_ forty winks, okay? I'll be up."

Klaus remembers sleeping for eighteen hours in a friend's parents' moth-eaten guest room when he had the flu last year. Sedatives had never been his favorite, but they did the trick back then and were probably at least partially responsible for his quick recovery. Klaus is trying not to think about that too much. He's had a rude awakening this time in finding out how difficult it is to get to sleep naturally when his temples throb and he’s having some trouble breathing and his body can't decide whether it’s hot or cold.

For the most part, the spirits don't bother Klaus at home these days (save for Ben, who hasn't shown himself since early last night when he _harassed_  Klaus into showing up at the dinner table to sip from a mug of bone broth), but the dry air in the mansion hasn't been helping much in lieu of comfort. He won't have a problem ending his seven-thirty A.M. siesta when the time comes, even if it has to come a little too soon.

"You sure?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."

"Okay," Five says, but it doesn't sound like he believes him.

"You're going to have to hang out with me all day to- _morrow_ when I'm laid up with pneumonia," Klaus decides. "You'll have to just listen to me cough for hours in retribution. You can't say no, I'll come and find you."

He's satisfied when Five rolls his eyes and pauses in the doorway, quirks his mouth up, tilts his head even higher and says, "Thanks, Klaus."

Five doesn't close the door — most of them don't, these days — but Klaus is halfway to dreamland before the sound of his brother's oxfords clacking against the hallway tile fades completely as he allows Klaus a fleeting respite from his horrible, treacherous illness in the form of a moment of peace and quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know when you're sick and you cannot think about ANYTHING else?!?? just imagine it and then imagine having to sit in a reclusive empty house and look like you're talking to yourself in front of two of your brothers. if you dont want to imagine it then thats ok because i'll be posting part two before ya know it
> 
> i debated between ending my notes with that or erasing it all and saying: i don't think he's actually that sick


	2. car (the journey)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> want to know something? italics on this website are a son of a bitch

Even though the country roads are empty and the drive up north is smooth, Diego's conscience is made up of nothing but a horrid combination of apprehension and guilt as he tunes into the exhaustive symphony of his brother's cold. Five had done his part in assuring Diego before that the mission was for the greater good (and boy oh boy does Five love the greater good), and that Klaus was likely to benefit from any impending discoveries too. The ends outweigh the means, he'd reasoned, and Diego couldn't fault him. It made perfect sense. Still, Five's hardheaded insight might be more convincing if Diego wasn't seeing Klaus frustratedly roll his eyes before sneezing _again_ every single time he looked back at him through the rearview mirror.

"Bless you," he says automatically, using the mirror's reflection to make eye contact. He's past the point of feeling like a broken record.

"Yeah, thank you," replies Klaus from behind one of the tissues out of the travel pack on the seat next to him. Matter of factly and without apology, he adds, "You guys are going to get sick too after spending so much time in the car with me."

It's weird to see Klaus so sedentary. Diego's used to watching his whirlwind of a brother float from space to space, his movements dramatic and somehow gracefully indelicate, seemingly unsteady but without any trouble catching himself even on a bad day, flailing lanky arms keeping him clumsily balanced. In contrast, feeling the full effects of a head cold has dampened his relaxed, active energy, giving Klaus a sullen edge despite how much he's trying to make light of it and maintain his usual playful conduct. He's not constantly readjusting himself or seeking very much stimulation lately, instead opting to participate in conversations that are already taking place and spending the rest of his time around others with his body leaned back fully and his mouth open just enough for him to be able to breathe.

It's not so easy to watch, and Diego figures he must be fighting something awful if it's draining him this much.

While Klaus is blowing his nose, Diego makes a point to assure him that he won't be catching damn a thing off of him, not only to nourish his own pride but to try and absolve Klaus of any viable guilt over something he doesn't have much power over. Maybe for nothing, he realizes just a second too late, because Klaus seems to think if anyone did catch something off of him they’d more than deserve it.

"No way," he says easily, because he's already decided on replying. "I take _care_ of myself. Haven't had so much as a sniffle in over five years. Might even be longer. My immune system's like an impenetrable fortress."

"Well, well, well then. Lucky you," Klaus comments, then makes way for a second sneeze, the kind that seems to take control and throw him around without him actually giving it any influence. He's not exactly loud about it, but each exasperated outburst is characteristically intense and expressive enough to warrant some kind of attention.

"Bless you," Diego repeats.

"Oh.  _Merci_ ," Klaus says.

It takes Diego a second to understand him. He expertly avoids a pothole as he takes a right turn onto a street lined with pine trees while his brain takes a second to catch up. "French?" Klaus hums shortly in affirmation. "Why?"

Klaus tips his head back. "I'm so _bored_ of sneezing."

"I don't think your body cares very much about keeping you entertained right now," Diego says.

"I'm giving us a chance to spice it up a little. Bring some culture into the process," Klaus explains. "You should follow my example. Help me out a little here. Use some other languages."

"You don't know that many languages," Five says without looking up from the yellow sheet of lined paper he seems to have fallen in love with for the past twelve miles.

"You don't know how many languages I know," Klaus replies haughtily after clicking his tongue. "Could be dozens."

Five flips the page over and says, "I don't think it's dozens. I don't even think it's doubles."

In a voice that mimics their father, Klaus says, "You should never make assumptions, Number Five," but surrenders the impression when his body cuts him off, his voice fading out and making him need to clear his throat.

Diego peeks at him through the reflection in the mirror and sees Klaus with his brow furrowed as he uses a fist to pat his chest gently. It's more of a fidget than a fix, something to do with his hands that comes with the added bonus to sort of feel like he's doing a little something to give himself some relief, Diego guesses. For all of his color and exuberance, Klaus has never had an aggressive or hearty touch. He'd clapped Diego's shoulder while talking to him on their way out to the car earlier, and the contact felt wilted; still feathery like he's used to, but with a hesitance that implied Klaus was making an effort to keep from leaning into it heavily.

For some reason, Diego feels so much worse watching Klaus try and uphold his regular carefree playfulness than he would if Klaus had let the lethargy take him over completely. There's an interesting contradiction to him like this. Klaus has never once hesitated to describe the details of how he was feeling, to remind everyone he was down with something, to lament using his usual verbose, dramatic flair about each and every symptom he's been experiencing. Like most things are with Klaus, the whole thing is authentic instead of manipulative -- he isn't trying to get anyone to do anything for him by complaining, he just likes to talk.

But at the same time, Klaus seems to be putting in an effort not to change. The biggest difference between Klaus when he was healthy and Klaus the past few days is an increase in solitude, but even that isn't really very extensive. Klaus has still been active, spending plenty of time outside of his room with the others (or even by himself, waiting for one of his siblings to show up), but he's been retiring on and off to either sleep or take a bath or tend to his symptoms more aggressively, and sometimes he doesn't return to any common areas unless someone goes out of their way to push him there. It seems like he'd spend half the day in bed without momentum, probably due to his getting stuck ruminating in how awful he feels instead of a severe type of fatigue. Still, though, just because he's well enough to be walking around doesn't mean he isn't sick enough for the right to be miserable when called to work.

"You said you wanted to use the car ride to try and rest," Diego says. "Preserve some of your strength for after we get there in case you need your powers for anything."

"He won't," predicts Five.

"If I could maybe go more than two minutes without sneezing," Klaus says, his reply overlapping slightly with Five's statement, "then I would _love_ to be able to rest, more than anything in the world. I would. You have no idea how exhausting it is to have to make yourself presentable enough to talk to a dead archeologist or _whatever_ after two days in bed and a _terribly_ rude awakening."

"You slept in over an hour past go-time," Five reminds him.

"Well, I could've used at least four more," Klaus says, "but thanks for not waking me up right away, I guess."

"The way you were snoring, sounded like you needed it," Diego says. His breathing had gotten so noisy by the time Diego went to check on him, and it'd have been heartbreaking to startle him awake, because Klaus probably wouldn't have complained enough about it to absolve Diego of his guilt (even though he really didn't have a choice). When he finally did wake Klaus up at quarter to ten, Klaus had only muttered _Seriously?_ and then _okay, okay, okay, just give me some privacy. Five minutes_. Diego resolved to stand outside his door listening to Klaus sniffle and turn his light on and blow his nose and tug on something warmer to wear and cough and gather up some supplies and blow his nose again. He'd looked marginally more rested when he emerged, and all Diego could really do about the situation was tell him,  _Sorry, man,_ and pat him on the back a few times on their way down the hall.

"Uh, I don't think I was snoring," Klaus says, but the end of his sentence gets squished together so he has enough time to sneeze toward his shoulder.

"Yeah you were. Bless you." Diego turns right onto a street that seems like it'll just take them deeper into the forest.

Klaus pulls in a deep breath and sneezes again, says "oh my god," and then sneezes a third time. "Jesus Christ, _sorry_ , thank you." He always seems caught off guard when they come in little groups like that, even though it's been happening fairly often since he started feeling under the weather.

"What language was that?" asks Five fondly.

"South African," Klaus replies without missing a beat. He sniffles fiercely. "How much longer?"

"Half hour," says Five. "Maybe twenty if you drive faster."

"I'm already going ten over," says Diego. "Relax. We'll get there. We've got the whole day."

No one says anything after that, Five opting to turn back to his notes and Klaus squinting as he watches the scenery through the side window. There's not much to see; this part of the county is mostly trees and dust and gravel, with the occasional break in the wall for a gate or a farm. It's a chilly day but still warm enough for nature to have come alive, flocks of birds lining an occasional tree branch or embarking in a swarm into the misty gray sky. It's not supposed to rain today -- Diego checked -- but the atmosphere feels threatening, with a pressure change and dampness that sinks into his bones. He assumes that Klaus is zoning out rather than observing, which tends to happen with him regardless of whether there are any ghosts around or not.

Ten minutes go by and Diego's considering asking Klaus if he's up to him turning on the radio or something when Five frowns and says, "You just missed our turn."

Diego shakes his head and says, "Nope. Cemetery."

"Aww, _Diego!_ " Klaus says hoarsely, his voice already rusted down. "You shouldn't have."

"I just don't want you all jumpy and unsettled before we even get to the house," Diego says. "You'd get distracted and the job's going to take longer."

Klaus ignores him. "I told you he wanted to take care of me."

Diego looks back up into the rearview mirror and sees that his brother's gaze has fixated on the opposite side of the backseat.

Ohh. "Ben back there with you?" he asks.

"No," Klaus says to the empty space, obstinate and heated. "Um," he clears his throat and looks at Diego through the mirror. "Sorry. Yeah, but he's being a pain in the ass."

"Poor Ben." Diego feels himself smiling while Klaus rolls his eyes.

"What's he think about Warner?" asks Five and his one track mind.

Klaus clears his throat again and flickers his eyes over to the side. He squints, then all he says when he addresses the front seat is, "Not much. He's excited to see what he has to say, I guess. And he won't stop chas _tising_ me for not eating breakfast or taking a bottle of-- _yes_ you are-- a bottle of water or something with me on the trip."

Diego doesn't have to look behind him when he takes the half-empty plastic bottle from the cup holder and tosses it into the backseat. The material crinkles when Klaus catches it.

"Ben's right," he says.

The way Klaus winces after taking a drink has Diego's own throat stinging in sympathy.

" _Ugh_ ," he complains. "It hurts to swallow."

"Hurts more to cough," wagers Diego, "so you better keep drinking."

He sees Klaus glaring at their brother's ghost, then Klaus scoffs and turns away to stare out the window, sipping silently from the bottle.

Klaus is quiet for the rest of the trip, save for another couple bouts of sneezing that prevent him from properly dozing like he probably needs to. The consistent motion of the car has lulled him to sleep before, especially when he's been up for days on a bender or wrung out from a mission, which makes the ride almost feel like a waste for not providing him the option for a little extra relief. He seems to be trying, though, and the less energy he expends, the better. Five is satisfied with the intermission as well, his only contribution to the soundspace being the rustle of papers and snapping of the leather case he's using to transport them.

It's a silence of contentment, not tension; the kind Diego has never been able to share with anyone but his siblings. He uses the remainder of the ride to clear his own head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i thought i'd just have two parts but it's hard to shut up sometimes. promise more ghosts are coming for those of you reading who came here to read about ghosts and nothing else (i'm assuming this is all of you)


	3. downstairs (the exploration)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh oh. i wrote parts 2 and 3 AND 4 (oh no...more parts) all at once and NOW i'm self conscious about having what will be 3 diego pov chapters in a row. how embarrassing! going to balance it out soon though trust me. i don't know if anyone cares about this sort of thing but me

Despite growing up isolated in what could arguably be classified as a modern day North American castle, the adopted children of the Hargreeves estate, save for two of them, have spent plenty of time in the various flavors of run-of-the-mill civilian dwellings. Their experiences differed, of course, as all experiences do and should; Luther and Five remained secluded as they entered adulthood in profoundly different ways -- voluntarily over-supervised and involuntarily unreachable -- but Allison attended parties in the contemporary mansions of Beverley Hills, and Diego has seen his fair share of homes as he valiantly protected their inhabitants from invaders.

Ben, following his passing as a teenager, has always gone wherever Klaus did. He could leave at will, Klaus once told the rest of his siblings, but often chooses to spend his time in the afterlife hanging out with or (in most cases) watching over Klaus. Not without reason, Diego assumes, especially because it's exactly the kind of thing Ben would do. Luckily for everybody, no one in their family has needed it more. Klaus has an clear-cut yet ambiguous past, with his only accommodations categorized into two distinct categories: the rehab clinic and the streets, the latter of which had him shacking up with someone new couple days or calling in favors to stay with a fair-weather friend. The company he kept was untrustworthy, maybe frivolous at the very best, and the side of town wherein Klaus resided wasn't necessarily renowned for its real estate.

All of that is evident in the way Klaus looks at their destination as they approach, his features first displaying interest followed by genuine curiosity. It's completely lacking in performance (unlike the expression accompanying his usual satirical, overacted "what-do-we-have-here") and implies that a place of its nature might be unfamiliar territory. Diego doesn't bring any attention to it, worried it might highlight the unusual gap in his Klaus' life. He knows intimately the pristine luxuries of monumental wealth and the unforgiving viciousness of the ruthless city streets, but very little in-between.

Instead of spiraling into a fruitless contemplation of his brother's past, Diego drags his eyes back to the road. All appears normal, which he thought would be a good sign, but once he pulls up to the house, a modest Victorian two-story nestled the end of a long, shrouded driveway, Diego can't help but tilt his head as he turns off the ignition.

"You seem surprised," Five says as he unbuckles his seatbelt.

Diego opens the door, steps out along with his brothers, and faces the property. "I expected it to seem a little more…" He can't think of the right word. He didn't realize he'd been expecting anything. "Haunted."

" _Ohhh_ it's haunted alright," Klaus says, ominous and expectant. He leans forward with his arms crossed over the hood of the car.

Five goes rigid, but Diego can't tell whether it's out of excitement or fear. "Is it?" he asks.

Klaus hoists himself up and looks at him. "No, I dunno," he says, shaking his head with a sardonic asymmetrical smile and sighing shrug. "You wish. Let's just... go inside and find out."

Diego takes the initiative to lead the way, for obvious reasons, making an effort to pat Klaus on the back of his pointy shoulder as he passes him and heads up the walkway. He hears Klaus coughing behind him, apologizing, then coughing some more. Diego doesn't like the sound of it. Not because it's annoying to listen to, but because there's an agitated thickness to it that seems like it might drag on forever if Klaus gave agency to the bottom of his lungs.

"You okay?" asks Five, halting his footsteps and looking over his shoulder.

"Haven't been healthier in years," Klaus chokes out. Five purses his lips and raises his eyebrows, impressed, because it technically might be true. The realization doesn't sit well as Diego understands it. "All right," Klaus nudges, waving his hands out at the two of them, "go on!"

The door doesn't budge when Diego pushes on the handle, so without thinking, he pushes harder. There's no yield at all. He promptly drops his hand.

"It's locked," he says.

He doesn't even have time to blink before Five has teleported and unlocked the door from inside the house.

"Why'd you think it wouldn't be locked?" he asks once he swings the door open.

"Nobody lives here." Diego steps inside.

"No, but somebody's about to," Five reasons, frowning as Klaus follows and shuts the door behind them.

"Huh, wow. Somebody already does," says Klaus as he steps inside, eyes locked on the corner of the front living room near a plastic-covered floral couch.

"Seriously?" Five says. "Already?"

In a hoarse falsetto sing-song, Klaus waves a hand and says, " _Hello…!_ " Then, he blinks, squints, and sharply arches his posture like he's taken aback. "What the hell?"

"What?" asks Diego.

"Uh, okay," Klaus says, but it doesn't look like he's talking to a ghost. His eyes are flicker around the room until they land on Diego and Five. "She left."

"So?" says Five.

" _Sooooo_ what the hell," Klaus emphasizes. "I'm like homecoming queen to these guys. They're obsessed with me. They can't get enough of me. And now, one of the only times I _do_ want to talk to one, she takes one look at me and pulls a _vanishing act!_ Seriously?"

Diego moves past Klaus and Five to get a better look at the room, which is furnished with pastel eighties décor that looks like it might belong to somebody's grandma. There's an empty wooden desk by the window facing the front of the house, but no chair to match, so he can only lean against its rounded edge. "You said 'she'?" he asks. "I thought we were looking for Warner."

"Yeah, real bored-looking lady, kinda seemed like she was waiting for somebody," Klaus describes.

"Clearly not us," Five says. He looks in the opposite direction, a short hallway leading into what looks like it might be a poorly-designed kitchen.

"God I hate ghosts," Klaus says. "Confusing bastards."

"You think she was waiting for the family to move in tomorrow?" Diego asks. "I mean. To torment them, just like what happened before? The accounts from the last family were pretty brutal."

Five mutters something to himself and heads down the hallway, but Klaus and Diego leave him to his independence and stay where they are.

"Why? What'd they… oh Jesus Christ," Klaus fades out, and his breath skips up-up- _up_ before he bends nearly in half and he shudders with another sneeze that Five can almost definitely hear from the other room.

"Bless you."

"...What'd they say?" Klaus sniffles, then sniffles again, then wrinkles his nose and runs the back of his hand underneath it. "Jesus. Okay, thanks."

While Klaus continues sniffling, Diego takes it upon himself to start poking around, careful to keep everything in its place in case the building's new inhabitants were particular about their ornaments. He opens one of the desk drawers -- empty -- and says, "Just the usual stuff. Hearing voices, seeing shit at night, things like that."

"Wow. Must be awful," says Klaus.

"...But there was one instance where the kid said she felt like she was being pushed toward the edge of the second floor staircase. She didn't fall," Diego continues, pointedly ignoring his brother's sarcasm. "And then another where the mom kept hearing whistling just before the gas stove got turned up too high. Eventually they couldn't even use it, even with the warning signs."

"Like…" Klaus sniffles before continuing. "Like human whistling?"

"Wasn't a tea kettle," Diego says. He closes the drawer. "Do ghosts usually show up in places based on the way they died?"

"I don't…"

"Because nobody died in the kitchen or a fire," Diego extrapolates, ever diligent. "I checked."

Klaus tilts his head, contemplatively focuses his gaze on the floor, hums, and shrugs. "I don't know. Maybe. I don't know the rules to these sorts of things."

"Well, have you noticed any patterns?" asks Diego.

"Not really," Klaus says. He shrugs. Curiously, he walks over to the desk and opens the drawer below the empty one Diego was inspecting, still sniffling. "I didn't know ghosts could, like, manifest or do shit on their own. Usually they just walk around pissed off that nobody can see or hear them, if they even know they're dead. I don't know if they can push anyone."

There's nothing in that drawer either, so Klaus closes it and wanders over to the windowsill next, the one close to the corner the ghost from earlier had disappeared from.

"Does Ben know?" Diego asks, following him over. Maybe he'll be able to feel the hair on the back of his neck stand up or something.

"Oh. Uh, Ben isn't here," Klaus tells him. "He left when we all became quiet in the car. I think he got bored."

"You know where he goes?"

"No idea."

Diego isn't feeling any sort of presence and doesn't really know if he should be, but either way, there's nothing to see by the windows so he turns around and does another scan of the room. Klaus joins him. It's not very big and doesn't look fit to entertain or lounge in, and a lot of the furniture doesn't go well together; a modern glass coffee table atop light blue carpeting along with with a vinyl patterned couch. It's got quite the personal touch for a place that's supposedly uninhabited, Diego thinks when he sees, ironically, a neat stack of _Home & Living _ magazines and a couple other genre-specific books sitting on the shelf closest to the front door. He wonders if they all belong to the same person or if the people about to live there have diverse interests, then he wonders whether there could be more than one spirit experimenting in their home.

"...But the ghosts can see _each other,_ right?" Diego asks after a few moments.

"They…" Klaus replies breathily, eyelids fluttering. "Hold on, I have to…" Then, he grabs Diego by the arm for balance and directs a sneeze off to the side. Diego feels a formidable tug, the sneeze strong and buoyant as Klaus shudders into it.

"Okay," Diego comments. "Uh-huh, you're welcome. Bless you."

Klaus lets go of him immediately and continues speaking, the occurrence happening too fast for Diego to reflect on it further. Klaus has never been too cautious about using him as a resource. "They can, I think." He sniffles. "But only sometimes? I'm still kind of iffy on that part." He sniffles again. "Maybe we should ask Ben when he comes back. I don't know-- I don't know why I never have."

"Another question," Diego prefaces.

"Sure." Another sniffle.

"How often do they interact with each other?" Diego asks.

Klaus doesn't need to pause long to think about it. "The ones who acknowledge each other usually knew one another while they were alive. Otherwise I don't think they-- I mean, I've seen it a few times, but usually they just ignore each other, if there are a lot of them."

Diego realizes he doesn't know much about the details of what Klaus sees from the other side. None of them had ever really asked, and Klaus was never eager to share. They've all been more open with each other over the past month, but there's a darkness and intensity to Klaus' powers in particular that Diego feels unhappy about never trying to help him explore.

"Are you _used_ to seeing a lot at once?" he asks. He can’t help but give away what he wants the answer to be. Seeing a couple ghosts is terrifying on its own, of course, but easily much more manageable than having to face a whole congregation of them. From what Klaus has said about their macabre appearances and despairing cries, it seems like it'd be a merry-go-round of trauma every time he closes his eyes. Were that the case, his resilience would be stirring, with an impressive, heartbreaking dignity that would come from his keeping quiet about it.

"Yeah, sometimes," Klaus says like it's nothing. He sniffles, holds out a steady, flat hand, palm down and says, "Sorry. I need to blow my nose before I can keep talking to you. This is so ridiculous."

Diego's surprised it took him that long to do something about it, but also, he's surprised at the nonchalance in Klaus' answer and his effortless abrupt change of subject. Diego takes a second to survey the space again before he follows Klaus out of the room, visually taking inventory as he catches up. It barely takes a couple strides; Klaus becomes just a little bit slower when he gets sick, an invisible heaviness on his shoulders and through his limbs affecting his usual leisurely gait. It's subtle, one of those things a person might not notice unless they were used to him. From the way Klaus has described his life after the Academy, it seems that not many others in his life ever have been.

Klaus finds what he's looking for rather quickly, and he vocalizes triumphantly as he tears off a sheet from the roll of paper towels sitting on a long table out in the hall. Next to it sits a neatly organized assortment of cleaning supplies, but no bucket, brush, or gloves included with them.

"The new owners must have paid to get the place cleaned before moving in," Diego says.

"Score one for me, then," Klaus says. He tents the paper towel around his nose and exhales into it for a really long time, pausing once to fold it in half and ask Diego, "D’you think Vinnie manifested and left the bottle of Clorox out as a hint? Haha," and then he resumes his task, brows raised as he makes eye contact with his brother above the white sheet and waits for a response.

"In that case, he should’ve just done it himself," scoffs Diego. "More productive than playing Casper's Scare School."

As he tears off a second paper towel and stuffs it in his pocket for later, Klaus drops his jaw in a mocking display of apprehensive jitters, gasps, and says, "Stop it! He might hear you!"

Diego pats Klaus on the shoulder and squeezes as he walks past him to lead them toward their next endeavor. "You're very funny," he says, and although the tone in his voice is derisive, he kind of means it. There’s a very Klaus-specific type of self aware irony to being a real-life medium and jokingly playing the part of a man who doesn’t believe in ghosts and makes fun of those who do.

Klaus sniffles again (somehow) and says, "There's danger brewing, Number Two, we can't be messing around, now." His consonants are sounding more lucid, at least for now, but he apparently needs to clear his throat anyway. "Well…! I’m going to go and turn on the haunted stove."

"Yeah, be careful," says Diego. He explicitly follows Klaus, the man who once threw a fire extinguisher at an interdimensional vortex, into the kitchen to supervise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again i have had to find a place to SPLIT my work in half because it got too huge. won't happen again i PROMISE. get ready. by the way i hope everyone is enjoying my top heavy intros and long long long long long long sentences


	4. upstairs (the escalation)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someone asked me what i did last week and i said "wrote ghost stories and became dehydrated"

The kitchen is yellow and brown and weird. From the left of the doorway, before he enters, Diego sees that the stove is right next to the oven, so that seems dangerous right off the bat. There’s a U-shaped countertop in the middle of the room, and none of the other countertops -- which are cluttered, by the way -- are the same height as one another, creating an uneven line along the walls. None of the cabinets Diego can see have any doors on them, or even door hinges, and the patterned linoleum floor is peeling by the sink.

Aside from its objective, embarrassing bleakness, there's something unsettling about being in a house so haphazardly dated while knowing it used to not be a house at all. It's very clear which rooms have been either added on or completely renovated, which may not be such a big issue if there was any flow to the house or correspondence between their respective designs. It's like being in some sort of time-machine themed fun house and reminds Diego of those over-repaired cars that have had all their doors and lights replaced from the wrong models, mismatched and clashing. The spaces are all divided up to represent very specific periods or fleeting fads in interior design, and the kitchen, emulating all of the contemporary earthiness of the 1970s, is no exception.

Klaus walks through the entryway first, and from out in the hall, Diego hears his confused, accusatory voice saying, "What are you _doing?_ "

Diego catches up, suddenly enclosed in the quintessence of bell bottoms and sideburns. His eyes focus on the room and he feels tension in his forehead as his eyebrows reach for the ceiling.

"What the hell, Five?" he agrees.

"Warner and his team used this room for observation," says their brother from inside an absolutely destroyed doorless walk-in pantry. He'd taken down one of the shelves and peeled off the wallpaper around it, shreds of color curled on the floor near his feet, and there's now what looked like a fresh slew of documents strewn everywhere and flooding out into the kitchen. What little food was in the pantry (all non-perishables and probably also expired, to be fair) had been tossed onto the floor. "Renovators out in the country aren't known for their meticulousness. They covered up one of the filing cabinets out of nowhere."

He explains his destruction with the confidence of a cult leader, as though introducing the parallel effects of a tornado into the new family's kitchen had been the most straightforward option available to him.

"I know," Five continues. "They made it unnecessarily difficult to access. They didn't need to; Warner's team seems to have cleaned it out pretty thoroughly."

" _You_ seem to have cleaned it out pretty thoroughly," says Diego.

"Yeah, and for no good reason," Five replies frustratedly. "I found some HR documents, but nothing else out of what little was actually left."

"This is like, a _thousand_ pages," comments Klaus.

"Most of it was from a generic policies and ethics manual," Five says. Diego waits for him to address the manual's state of disembodiment and the overall mess he managed to make in under fifteen minutes, but Five just keeps talking. "I don't think anyone actually used it. Probably just for show so Warner could keep receiving grants."

"Uh-huh," Diego says. "So now that you've completed your excavation, what are you going to do about all of this?"

"Probably just keep searching," Five says. "Warner worked upstairs, so there's bound to be--"

"I mean about all of _this_ ," Diego says, sharply gesturing to the disarray created from his brother's hands.

"All of _what?_ " asks Five, mirroring his fervor. Every once in a while, his fuse seems to get cut in half (you'd think it was hormones, but he's been like that for as long as Diego's known him), and his confusion easily escalates into agitation. Still, Diego doesn't budge, so Five finally scans the area, face blank, and says, "Ah. Shit."

Klaus leans forward onto the island countertop facing the pantry. With more sympathy in his voice than Diego would be able to muster, he puts on a flighty grin and says, "I bet the apocalypse wasn't very tidy."

 _It's okay if you're still adjusting,_ he's trying to say, but Five waves him off.

"I was in a hurry," he says.

"Hmmm. Force of habit, then, perhaps?" guesses Klaus. He rocks back and forth on his elbows. "What do we think?"

"No," Five says. "It's not-- It's fine. I'll take care of it. I guess I was focusing and just didn't realize…"

"Yeah," Klaus says simply, cutting him off in a voice that's insincerely meant to imply he's bored of the conversation. Normally he might push, but Diego guesses he might be too tired today, too quick to deflate. Even as he pushes himself back off of the counter to stand up straight, his eyes have a distant weariness to them. "Okay. Uh, well, then _bon voyage,_ I guess if _you_ want to maybe just stay behind and clean up your collection, the rest of us can… Um…"

His dwindling statement gets everyone's attention, the abrupt change in tone shifting the mood in the room. Diego and Five both straighten up when they look at Klaus, his eyes squinted and stroking back and forth in a concentrated line toward the stairs.

"What?" says Five mildly.

It's not really a mystery. While he's in general kind of spacey for probably at least a dozen reasons, Klaus doesn't usually stop a thought in its tracks unless something external pulls him there.

Klaus is frowning, and then there's an uneasy intensity to his too-bright eyes before he rolls his them with a sigh and turns around to leave. As he steps backward and spins with a flourish, hand extended as he propels himself toward the foyer, he groans and says, "Fine!"

It's the exact kind of behavior that has always made Klaus so confusingly _himself,_ and had it happened a couple months ago, it would've been classified as another weird Klaus thing, dramatics and flamboyance directed seemingly at nothing and an unidentifiable result of either the drugs he was on, a bid for attention, or, very occasionally, the clairvoyance that he staunchly refused to confront.

Things are different now, though, and Diego and Five don't have to hold each other's gaze for long before they follow him, the decision unanimous and unspoken.

"Klaus!" Diego calls, because he wants to know what's going on.

"Wow. You guys really need me, don't you!" says Klaus from halfway up the stairs.

"You're after somebody," assumes Five eagerly, raising his voice to make sure Klaus hears. That's all pretty obvious, but Klaus offers an altruistic response with no direct answer.

"How fortunate for _you_ that I agreed to come all the way out here for the sake of the family…!" he continues. Five grunts, impatient, but Klaus and his diversions are plenty predictable. Of course he's imposing a game with them this close to showtime, when the action of their quest is finally coming to a head.

Even though he hadn't ambled up the stairs in much of a hurry at all, Klaus is still looking winded once Diego and Five catch up with him on the second floor. His expression is smug regardless, but whatever, that's forgivable. At least his this is enough activity to keep him from thinking about how awful he feels.

"Here?" asks Diego.

"Yeah, he…" Klaus holds up a hand, out of breath, but he doesn't seem all too bothered. He shakes his head. "Okay. He didn't say anything, which was weird. But--"

"But he lead you up here," Five gathers. "Do you think it was Warner? Was he older?"

"Not in the way you're…" Klaus' words wobble and his eyes become narrow with frustration.

"Take a minute." 

"Yeah." Klaus leans back against the wall out of what Diego sees as exasperation, not exhaustion. "I'm just trying not to cough," he explains pointedly, still pausing to catch his breath, "because that's what'll happen if I take a deep breath, and then I'll lose my _voice,_ and then everybody's fucked unless you'd like to use me as a ouija board." He raises both his hands palm-side-up. "Though I wouldn't be opposed."

"You're ridiculous," Diego says.

Klaus shakes his head with an understated smile. The color's back in his face, but he stays where he is, half of his body leaned back against the wall because he never wants to sit or stand like a normal person.

"You have to be nice to me," he says. "I am _so_ ill and I'm doing you the hugest favor."

"I think," Diego says, "you shouldn't have been doing high-intensity lunges up a flight and a half of stairs with an upper respiratory infection."

"Well, we've all got our own opinions," Klaus replies. He launches off of the wall. "You know, I was only doing my duty and putting my health on the line trying to capture your ghost. Hmm. Wonder where he went."

"Okay, okay," says Five, still fretful, but ultimately at his brother's mercy because there's nothing he nor Diego can do but rely on Klaus to be at the forefront of their endeavors. There's truly no real threat there -- Klaus wouldn't come all the way out to the sticks if he weren't planning on following through --  but Diego doesn't like feeling this useless. There's no option for him to do much aside from trusting that his brother knows what he's doing.

Klaus resumes his path and starts poking his head into the bedrooms. The exercise seems to have brightened him, despite its temporary threat to his lungs, instead of depleting his energy like Diego thought it would. All of his complaining makes the external, persistent symptoms seem to come from a more precarious place, but when it comes to ordinary and non-threatening ailments Klaus sometimes tends to seem a lot worse off than he really is. It makes sense that a deviation from a usual breezy vivaciousness is going to be a lot more noticeable on someone like Klaus, and of course bearing witness to that could cause anyone's concern to spiral.

It doesn't help that Klaus has a tendency to conceal the more serious struggles with his well-being -- the indicators that he's feeling really, truly awful -- and that leaves everyone else with the responsibility of trying to guess what's really wrong and risk assuming the worst.

"It's weird that they're so quiet," Klaus repeats. He sniffles, which makes him cough a few times anyway, purposefully restrained and behind a non-committal fist that he's brought halfway to his mouth mostly for show. Even with Klaus' delicacy, it's easy to hear that his lungs aren't happy.

When Klaus pauses and holds his breath, Diego asks, "What, usually they wanna chat your ear off?"

Klaus nods as he exhales into another couple of coughs. "Yeah," he says, his voice bouncing a little, caught in his throat. "They've got a lot to say."

"Like what?" asks Five, his voice gentle and curious. Klaus making an obstinate decision to reject his powers when they were younger meant that nobody else really knew much about them aside from the vague negatives he listed off and his limitations while he was high. Only recently, once Klaus decided to pursue exploring them, has anyone else been able to learn their specifics. It feels natural to be interested, so long as he's willing to share.

With melodramatic exasperation, Klaus sighs and says, "Annoying bullshit."

"That means it's pretty bad," Five translates.

"It's mostly just my name," Klaus lists, "or saying they want me to help them, wailing their tales of grief, all sorts of other unimaginative ghost small talk." Five's right, it _is_ bad, but Klaus doesn't seem to want to talk about it. "You just have to ignore them and eventually they drown each other out."

Diego and Five share a look of mutual understanding, a look of surprise. Five frowns; he wants to know more, but Diego communicates a shrug with his raised eyebrows which confirms to him that they need to drop it. Sometimes that's where their questions end up, with Klaus giving an air of carefree openness that indicates plain as day that his guard has come right back up, activated and solid until he decides he's ready to take it down again. Sometimes it takes a couple minutes and sometimes it takes a couple days, but the rest of them have become perceptive enough to know that it's one of those things where the ball needs to stay rooted in his court.

Connecting with one another, however brief, means Diego and Five end up missing Klaus skipping ahead, throwing open one of the hallway closet doors, and surveying the shelves. When Diego's eyes land on Klaus, he's putting something in his pocket, then he swivels the upper half of his body to face them while holding up a pair of twin rosaries.

"What do you think?" he asks, their metals sparkling in the sunbeams as he pulls them both up over his head. Diego knows that's supposed to be offensive, but he doesn't remember why. The jewelry, one shiny silver and teal, the other onyx and gold, clashes with the draped cashmere sweater that he'd either received or stolen from Allison. Absently, Diego wonders whether anything Klaus is wearing had always belonged to him.

He doesn't actually seem to care whether Diego and Five agree with his choice of adornments, having made his disrespect for both of their approaches to style very clear. Klaus holds a cross out from his chest and admires it.

"What did you take?" Diego asks with an upward nod toward the closet.

Klaus looks at him and says, " _Oh,_ just some clutter. No one'll miss it."

"You know, we can buy whatever it is that you think you want here. You don't have to steal," Diego reminds him, but Klaus shakes his head.

"Things aren't the same brand new," he says dismissively, as though _don't be a thief_ had been a ludicrous suggestion on Diego's part. Unsurprisingly, Five doesn't have any protests to offer. Diego is starting to think that everyone's leftover bad habits are going to start really getting in the way. "They don't have a history."

"Uh-huh. They got a thermometer in there, Macklemore?" Diego asks next, voice smooth, knowing better than to try and open up a conversation about hand-me-downs. He's been meaning to ask about Klaus' temperature, though, since halfway through the car ride.

Klaus doesn't even check. "Uh, nope. Don't need one," he says. He brings the palms of his hands up to cup both his cheeks, then slides the right one up to his forehead for a second and says, "Hundred and one."

"It is not," says Diego. He steps forward and removes Klaus' hand from his forehead and replaces it with his own. "Whoa."

Klaus makes eye contact. "What?"

Diego's body goes rigid with attention. He turns to address Five and says, "C'mere. Feel this."

"What?" Five says. "Why?"

He reaches up toward Klaus' face anyway, but Diego stops him.

"No," he instructs, "my hand was just there. Back of the neck."

Five frowns and obeys, first with the palm of his solid and tiny thirteen-year-old boy hand and then with the back. "What?" he repeats. "You feel fine. Little warm. Nothing unusual."

"What?" Diego says as Five moves away. "No, that's not--"

Confused, he touches the spot Five had just let go of, then moves his hand around to the front by his lymph nodes and then back up to his forehead. Diego keeps his eyes angled up toward the ceiling to prevent intimacy.

"What the hell?" he says.

"Okay, thanks, enough manhandling, thank you," Klaus says as he brusquely steps back, wriggling out of his brother's grasp. "What is the problem?"

With too much intensity, Diego says, "Give me your hand. I'm serious."

Klaus sighs and says, " _Why?_ " and then he says, "Why."

"Oh my God, Klaus, can you just--"

"Fine, yes, okay, _fine, fine._ "

Diego pushes up the left sleeve of pastel cashmere and pats up and down the skin of Klaus' inner arm, still confused. He presses down on the center of his palm, then grasps his hand experimentally.

"This is so weird," he says.

"What's going on?" demands Five.

"Oh, this is so weird," Diego repeats. "Well-- I think for the most part you do have a fever."

"So?" Klaus says.

"For the most part," repeats Five.

Diego exhales as he ruminates. "Okay, give me your other hand," he says.

Klaus does, but not without groaning about it. Using all of his concentration, Diego holds both of his brother's hands at the same time and waits. With unfocused eyes he stares down at Klaus' skin, peripherally noticing the soft material of his shirt moving up and down as he breathes. When he peers back up at his brothers, neither one of them looks impressed.

Suddenly, he startles.

"There," he says. He looks at Klaus. "You didn't feel that?"

"What? Diego," Klaus says. "Didn't feel what? Are you fucking with me?"

"C'mere," Diego says again to Five. He takes his wrist and tries not to think about how delicate it feels, then maneuvers everybody so both Five and Diego are gently pinching either side of Klaus' right hand. "Now just wait a sec."

"What am I supposed to be waiting for, exactly?" Five asks.

"Jesus Christ, can't you just _tell us_ what you think you felt?" asks Klaus. His left hand taps restlessly against the side of his thigh.

"Oh," rouses Five. "Oh, huh."

"Yes. Yes, you feel that?" asks Diego, relieved.

"No," says Klaus.

"Wow," says Five.

"But everything else feels normal, right," Diego says.

"Sort of," Five agrees. He lets go. "The heat around it might just be because he's fighting something, since Klaus usually runs sort of cold anyway."

"Yeah, but not like _that,_ though," Diego says.

Klaus yanks his right hand away and grasps it possessively with his left. He looks to Five for help, presumably because Diego hasn't been giving him what he wants. "What is going on? What am I supposed to be feeling?"

"I think it's-- oh my God, bro, I think it might be because of your freaky tattoo," Diego realizes. "Okay." Decisively, he beckons for Klaus to give him his hand back. "I'll explain in a second, I promise."

He doesn't wait for his brother's permission and clasps his hand again, pulling it toward him. The area is still enough for everyone to hear the faint whistle in Klaus' chest as he exhales tersely and draws his mouth into a tight, thin line. Not many seconds pass before he lets his willowy arm go limp, leaving Diego to hold it up like a suitor greeting to a fair maiden, and Klaus' impatient, shifty eyes -- he's going to give himself a headache -- decidedly take the place of his previous imploring stare.

They go still and he blinks. Klaus says, "Diego--"

And Diego holds up his index finger, his concentration making his own hand feel like it's floating. Klaus sighs but relents, pulling together just enough composure to maintain the silence.

Then, finally, at the front of his non-dominant palm just above the thickly inked _HELLO_ inscribed in the middle, the surface of Klaus' skin arrhythmically flickers ice cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when i start making stories i never plan on shit getting this haunted but my passion for superstitious nonsense wins out every time


	5. different bedroom [the encounter]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember "what a disturbing glimpse into that thing you call a brain"? well guess who's starting to understand

Klaus has been unbelievably rude to ghosts for his whole life. It's a fair reaction, Number Five supposes, because those who are dissatisfied enough with the other side to try and appear before the living probably hadn’t died very clean deaths, and having to face the visual and emotional effects of their postmortem grief -- not by choice, and with little explanation or comfort -- must have been crippling for him to endure as a young boy. It’s easy to see why Klaus was driven to limitlessly grasp for methods that would allow him to reject his powers altogether as his childhood fear sunk somewhere deeper and anchored itself to his core.

Still, that isn't necessarily the ghosts' fault.

Since Klaus and his determinism have been making strides in finally addressing his self-described curse, Number Five has seen Klaus willfully communicate with ghosts several times. When he doesn't want to see them, he maintains his discourteous behavior by either ignoring or openly admonishing them, still unaware of whether they're strong enough to appear before him on their own or if he's accidentally, unknowingly conjuring them. It still remains unclear, and Luther has theorized that it could be a mismatch of both, depending on the spirit and Klaus' amount of strength during each respective occurrence (though there seem to be quite a few of them). It'd be awfully cruel to call someone over from the realm of the dead only to try to silence and banish them, but Klaus insists he isn't doing it and, when he doesn't have the energy to concentrate enough to send them away, belligerence is his last resort in getting his tormentors to disappear.

On the contrary, when he actually does try to speak with the dead, Klaus is surprisingly polite.

"All right, where-- Whoa, okay, there you are! Yep, hi. Great. Hi. Great. How a _r_ e you doing?"

Sometimes with such an effort that he sometimes surpasses the fraying threads of social skills he already has and ends up with the awkward hesitance of a teenage boy introducing himself to his first partner's father. It's one of the only times Number Five has ever heard him sound like that.

"That's good." Klaus is speaking carefully, almost gently, like he's beckoning a confused, lost, ferocious animal toward an offering of food and shelter. The fuzziness of his consonants make the quality of his voice seem softer, despite its being deepened by the austere drag of illness. "Glad to hear it. Me too."

Klaus folds himself onto the master bedroom's deep green armchair, then drums his fingers against his propped-up knee and shifts his eyes around the room. Number Five isn't sure why he's so uneasy. Klaus had told them just before they stepped into the room that the ghost of Vincent Warner's late assistant, Jeremy Rice, looked more or less like a normal young man despite his dated clothing, and probably hadn't died horrifically like some of the others who appeared before him, the ones who were nothing but sad and furious and gruesome. What a pleasant surprise for Klaus and his everlasting prosperity.

"Did you just ask a dead man's ghost how he was doing?" asks Number Five.

"How do you start _your_ conversations?" Klaus says back. He very curtly turns away to face the empty air in front of him. "So how long have you--"

"You can be more direct, you know, it's okay," Number Five jumps in to assure him. He'd like to make sure the task is done right. "He's an academic."

"Object _permanence,_ Number Five, _please,_ " Klaus says. "Just because you can't hear him doesn't mean he can't hear you. Stop interrupting us."

They hadn't found Rice's ghost right away. Once the three of them had determined that somebody's presence was scrabbling for attention the only way they knew how -- through the hands of a human being and the hello-goodbye markings of a ouija board -- they were lead to the bedroom at the end of the hall and tasked with figuring out two of its components: Why Klaus wasn't able to sense the ghost at all, but his non-necromancer brothers could feel it, and what the hell it wanted from them in the first place.

Unfortunately, they still have yet to figure out the answer to either one, and are instead preoccupied with navigating a budding dilemma: the priorities of his conversation. Klaus could try and consider those questions with Rice first, or he could skip straight to a discussion about Warner and his relationship with their father. The latter makes more sense, with less of a risk of running out of time in case Klaus stopped being able to communicate for whatever reason. Klaus, though, had insisted that there was no chance of Rice disappearing on him, and if there was, then finding out what to do about the newfound ambiguity of his powers would probably be more useful in getting him back in the long run. The risk is higher there and the reward less likely, but in the end, as the only medium in the room, Klaus is the one in charge of the final say. Diego and Number Five don't really have a choice.

Klaus exchanges pleasantries with Rice for a few minutes, unbothered about keeping his brothers in the dark. The way his eyes continue to steadily move around the room indicates a restlessness on Rice's part, but Klaus, with his engaged forward slouch and feet pulled unbecomingly onto the chair, is beginning to look more comfortable.

He addresses Number Five and Diego as he looks to where they're standing by the vanity dresser against the wall. "He _wanted_ to talk to me," he informs them, then turns back to the other side of the room and says, "So, why didn't you?" He tilts his head, brow furrowed, confused as Rice gives him an answer. "...Why not?"

It's strange to watch only one half of a conversation. Number Five would liken it to being in the same room as a person while they're taking a phone call, only in this case the person on the other line can see and hear everything he’s doing and he has to depend on his brother to translate everything in a way that's timely, inclusive, and accurate, which isn't an easy balance for most anybody to try and strike. It's different with Ben, whom the rest of them had known intimately for nearly twenty years, his temperament so complete in their minds that it sometimes feels like they're watching an interaction completely without Klaus having to go to the trouble of physically manifesting him. In contrast, a stranger's ghost is enigmatic, and because Klaus isn't particularly ordinary in his own interactions most of the time, it's hard to use him as a measure of any particular spirit's image.

"He isn't able to leave the room," Klaus updates his brothers. "Because, um… Sorry, why? Sorry." He's tilted his head back to refer to Rice. Number Five regrets not bringing him more caffeine to keep his attention up, especially when he isn't feeling well or anywhere near the top of his game. "Because he used to-- Are you sure? How do you know that?"

"Because why?" Diego prompts. He's getting impatient. His arms have been crossed since they entered the space, shoulders back in the same position he assumes when he's on guard to protect somebody, even though, were things to go awry, there would be nothing he could do for Klaus no matter what the stakes. Aside from Vanya, whom they'd all thought to be ordinary up until very recently, Klaus has been the most likely to assume the other side of that role due not only to his rejection of his powers rendering him with essentially none at all, but also his general indisposition for responsibility, alertness, and self-regard. While he's right there with them in the middle of the action of a mission, it's been accidentally ingrained into them, at least a little, to want to watch out for Klaus (whether that's directly or, most of the time, simply making sure stays out of the way), even now after they've seen him at a point where he's able to hold his own.

Listening to the peakiness in his voice as he navigates the situation certainly doesn't do much to draw them away from the habit.

"Be _caaaauuse_ ," Klaus says, stretching the word to give himself extra time to listen, "the other spirits in this house are keeping him trapped--"

Bingo. That’s got to be Warner. "How many others?" Number Five interjects, because it's more important to know _who_ rather than _why._

Klaus raises an arm and holds up three fingers, then bows his head toward the opposite shoulder and Number Five hears a short moderation of that terrible cough.

"Four ghosts in the same house," repeats Diego. Klaus nods. "Is that normal?"

"In a place like this…" He coughs again on the last word, unexpectedly, chest bouncing once and then he's done. "I don't think so."

"And none of them wanted anything to do with you."

"Ex _cept_ for Jeremy," Klaus reminds him, mostly recovered. He clears his throat. "And he's stuck in the master bedroom because one of the others thinks he's her husband."

Diego says, "What?" at the same time that Number Five says, "She wants to keep her husband hostage?"

"Yeah," Klaus says. "No one knows who she is, they think she got lost or something. She found Jeremy here because it used to be Vinnie's office so he was sort of here anyway once he died, but now he can't leave. Why can't you leave?"

They're all fortunate that communication is so effortless for him. Others have put in strenuous effort to contact the dead, begging for just a glimmer of indication of presence, but they appear to Klaus so clearly that they may as well be fully alive and tangible. Aside from what it means to have a super-ability at all, there's incredible power in being able to do something that most people _think_ they have the capacity to perform and probably aren't even coming close to achieving. Klaus must understand this, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten those ridiculous tattoos.

While he's being excluded, Number Five tries to picture the bedroom as it once was, a desk replacing the king size bed and a bookshelf set up where the dresser would be. The floor is presently a dusty, plush white carpet, but it's easy to imagine it instead as a thin and brown sheet of nylon; something you wouldn't feel bad walking on without taking off your shoes. The plastic ferns by the closet may have already been there before there were any renovations, but Number Five isn't curious enough to ask Klaus to confirm.

"The windows and door are like a threshold," Klaus explains for Rice, finally, then he pounds a fist on his chest and clears his throat again, harder and longer than he had before. He turns away toward the wall. "So she-- Okay. Okay. So who are the other two, then, did you know them? Could one of you get me some water."

"I'll go look," volunteers Diego, quick to follow Klaus' erratic line of conversation, his chin down and hand raised like he's in school. His choice doesn't make much sense, given that Number Five could easily blink downstairs, rummage around, and come right back up in probably under a minute, but he'd rather listen to Rice and he figures Diego's looking for something to do. The plumbing should be turned on by now, if people are supposed to be living here in less than twenty-four hours, but Number Five doesn't remember seeing any cups or glasses in the kitchen cupboards.

Klaus doesn't sound much worse than he did when they first arrived at the house, just congested and periodically scratchy, but the dry air from the furnace might be making him uncomfortable. Number Five could just ask.

"You okay?" he says, earnest but distant.

"I'm fine," Klaus says. He flaps a hand for emphasis ("calm down," it's telling him) _,_ which is unlike the way he tends to want to acknowledge anything that's ever wrong with him, and probably acting as a restriction on his displaying too much vulnerability in front of a potentially dangerous ethereal being. Number Five wishes there was something he could do for him, not that he would really know what that might be or how he'd go about asking it.

Klaus doesn't give him a chance to try and offer regardless, because he turns to look up toward a standing lamp and abruptly steers the subject elsewhere. "Do you know why I had no idea that other one was around, the guy who lead me in here?" he asks Rice. "Not the-- No, not the one who walked up the stairs. The one everyone could feel on my hand but me."

That's his last question about his powers for now, Number Five can tell. There's a finality to it. Klaus has been eager lately to learn more about the full capacity of his abilities, ever since the would-have-been apocalypse when he decided to stop hiding from them. Now, when he suspects he may be able to get more information on them without having to practice directly, Klaus follows that lead with a bright-eyed yearning.

But something slower to change about Klaus is his struggle with perseverance, and once he comes up dry on something, he tends to consider that resource to be a loss for good. That's where he ends up with Rice, his conclusion evident in his tone as he says, "All right. Well, we want to ask you a couple of other things, if you'll be around." He waits, smiles tightly like he's acknowledging a joke, and nods.

Without taking his bright and focused gaze off of the vacant spot in front of him, Klaus masks his feelings, exhales like he's about to go into battle and says, "Okay."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cannot BELIEVE they put those ouija board hello/goodbye tattoos on his hands and never even acknowledged that about them in the show and it ended up making people think he got them solely to wave hola and adieu to people. guys please


	6. outskirts of the bedroom [the acquaintanceship]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if i was driving a car and you were in my car then i would tell you to buckle your seatbelt and then i'd floor the gas pedal and you'd fear for your life! just kidding. i'm a pretty good driver and we would have a roaring good time like a couple of tigers roaming the jungle

Number Five has never been particularly disturbed by long silences, but there exists an ever-looming, imaginary pressure to be doing something while his environment appears to be vacant, especially when somebody else in the room is occupied with something impossible for him to involve himself in. Everything is taken care of in this exact moment but it still doesn't feel right, especially when Klaus is the one performing (even though that's exactly how things are supposed to be right now). It takes a while to get used to. In the meantime, Number Five can only employ a good amount of disciplinary muscle tension to keep him from tapping his foot while he stands off to the side with only the window's display of the fickle grey-and-golden sky to look at, and nothing to listen to but his brother's noisy breathing.

"Uh, _so,_ can you tell us anything about-- Wait, sorry, did _you_ work here in the late eighties?" Klaus sniffles, straightens his posture while he listens and drops one leg, stretching it out in front of him. "Well, look at you, big king of the castle!" He grins, friendly and supportive. "I bet it felt so cool getting to boss all those old-timers around."

His voice fades in and out a couple of times as he moves his gangly body around in the chair. Why does he like to sit like that?

Klaus nods raptly for a while, says "yeah," nods some more, says "uh-huh," rubs his nose a lot, purses his lips into an impressed frown, and leans against the side of the chair. Number Five feels like he's getting the gist of what Rice is saying: high-powered position, success at a young age, maybe even some sort of savant. It's promising. He must have been plenty intimate with Warner and his work.

"I bet you got to hang out with Vin-- uh-- with _Warner,_ all the time," Klaus says, riding along Number Five's wavelength. "Uh, shit, what do you want me to call him?"

Ever considerate, Klaus' expression is engaged but otherwise unreadable while Rice describes his relationship with Warner. While Rice's side of the conversation doesn't go on for long, Number Five feels almost itchy having to idle as he waits for an update. There really is nothing for him to do in this room, and he's stuck in a limbo wherein he needs to stay present, which takes reading or any other marginally occupying activity off the table, but with very little to actually pay attention to. It's remarkably taxing to bored and alert at the same time.

Eventually, momentarily, Klaus spares him.

"Hey. Guess what," he says to Number Five.

"Hmm?" prompts Number Five, his attentive gaze meeting Klaus' knowing, anticipatory one.

"Vincent's gone," Klaus says. "Like, the guy is dead to ghosts. Passed on to the other realm peacefully, no baggage, nobody's seen him since the day of."

Rotten luck. "Really?"

"Yeah."

"You can't conjure them when they're like that?"

Klaus just stares at him. "You've got to be kidding me," he says. He leans back, lolling his head in mock-affection. "Oh, Number Five, _look_ _at you,_ conjuring up your own sense of humor, and you're so good at it! You must be. Because-- gosh-- do you remember that time when you decided today would be a _great day_ to come to my sickbed and ask me to come with you to--"

"Okay, all right, sorry," Number Five says posthaste. He's lucky Klaus has never been one to anger. He's seen his brother become irritated or sarcastic or sulky no problem, but he's never been mean or cutting or prone to holding a grudge, often choosing to lighten and dissolve or simply leave a situation instead. Number Five takes a moment to appreciate that. "Sorry. Wasn't thinking."

"Jeremy was close to his-- Yeah?" Klaus is fine. He looks over at the wall, squints at something, then comes back again. "--Was close to his work. I'm sure he can tell us pretty much all the same stuff."

And Klaus has always been good at believing in people.

"Did he-- Did you guys-- uh, have any correspondence with anyone other than Reginald Hargreeves?" asks Klaus. He'd assured everyone earlier, before they'd even left home, that they wouldn't have to worry about their identities. For the most part, he'd said, ghosts were just clawing to have someone to talk to and didn't care enough about him or the living in general other than to ask any questions or enact revenge, but that was before they'd discovered the abnormalities of the spirits in this particular house. It's uncertain whether Klaus is planning to keep that arrangement in place. Number Five is no expert himself, but it doesn't seem like a good idea.

Klaus makes eye contact and shakes his head from side to side. He looks tired.

Next, he asks Rice, "Do you know why they split up?"

Number Five watches him nod, stare, nod, clear his throat, nod, lift his eyebrows, stare, cough, and nod. It goes on for at least a minute or two, and some of the light returns to his eyes. His expressiveness has Number Five feeling too inquisitive not to cut in and say, "What?"

"Wow," Klaus chuckles. "You are not gonna believe this. Straw that broke the camel's back?"

"What?" Excellent.

"This girl--" Never mind.

"Klaus--"

"--dad brought home from merry old England."

"Klaus--"

"Yes, yes, just flabbergasting, I know."

He's taking revenge on Number Five for requesting he try and conjure a missing spirit while ailing terribly with a sore throat and stuffy nose. Of course he is.

"Supposed to be really beautiful. Long legs, curly blonde hair."

"Klaus."

"Vincent stole her right out from under him. _So unfair,_ there's just no reconciling after that, is there? When a friend does you so dirty? What a snake."

"Klaus."

"They had a falling out over a girl, can you believe that, our dear old dad?"

" _Klaus_ ," says Number Five. "Hello? This is serious."

Klaus, as usual, is entirely impervious to being reprimanded. He laughs again, a light chuckle so buoyant that it sounds like it could carry him over the choppiest tempest waters.

" _Ohhh,_ all right, all right. You know what?"

"Fine," Number Five says. He has no choice but to bite.

"Not my idea this time," Klaus claims, smiling with his eyes half-lidded and his lips drawn tight as he flops back against the chair. " _Jeremy_ says you're too uptight. He was getting bored."

Number Five sincerely can't tell if Klaus is telling the truth about _that_ or not, which bothers him, because he feels like he should.

For all of Klaus that's perfectly transparent, there's just as much about him that's unexpectedly, infuriatingly enigmatic. A lot of the time it seems like he's trying his damnedest to throw out a wisecrack or jab that he's absolutely certain everybody in the room is going to hate, but occasionally it appears as though he's assuming people are in on something with him that's actually entirely unreadable. Number Five hates being unable to reliably crack his code.

"No, the divide was pretty amicable," Klaus continues, his voice casually soothing, like he's trying to get Number Five to settle down by bringing him out of what Klaus considers to be the darkness of sincerity. "Nothing exciting. They had different ambitions. Vinnie wanted something quieter."

"Quieter as in… nothing to do with us," Number Five interprets, no longer worried about a cover story after Klaus had revealed their status as Hargreeves' adopted children. Well, there aren't really any other plausible reasons they'd be doing this anyway. The three of them certainly couldn't play the part of university students researching for a project, not looking and talking and acting like they do.

"Yeah, he wasn't even interested in… Oh, no shit?" Klaus stops and goes quiet again. Rice seems to love interrupting him. "What did _you_ think of that? Wait." He turns to Number Five, who's impressed at how adept Klaus is becoming at bridging a pair of concurrent conversations when he really focuses, even through the mild fever and whisper of fog in his head. "You know dad's, like…" He rolls his head back, stares at the ceiling in search of the right word. "All of his, like…" He murmurs to himself, the sound coming out rough and jagged through the congestion. Eventually, he finds something he likes and brings his chin back down. "...Monkey research?"

"That's not what I'd _call_ it," Number Five answers, "but yes."

"They worked together on a few things before that," Klaus tells him. "But he wanted his name off the publications, then bowed out because he started to worry about all sorts of ethical issues."

"And of course Dad didn't mind taking all of the credit," Number Five says.

"No," Klaus scoffs, "of course not."

"What kind of ethical issues?" Number Five asks. "Is it the ambiguity we already know about, or was he hiding--"

"Uhh one sec."

"--something more clear-cut?"

Klaus ducks down abruptly with a stuttered gasp and sneezes twice, quick and emphatic like he's trying to get them out of the way, but with a shudder that says they'll do as they damn well please with him whether he tries to take the reins or not. The recovery isn't instant, but when he comes back up with a taut shake of the head and a likely pardon queued in his speech, his eyes are narrow but sparkling in a look of confusion laced with delight.

" _Thank_ you," he says to the edge of the bed in front of him. "What is that, is that Italian?"

The expression on his face when he looks at Number Five is so goddamn cocky.

"Portuguese!" He sniffles, looking impressed. "Do you speak…? _Oh!_ Oh yeah, sure. Nice, that's lovely, that's fabulous."

Really, that's all it takes for the two of them to veer out of order?

"Hmm. So you notice things like that too. Mm-hmm. Yes, well, actually not always, sometimes I guess, but oh my God, earlier today…"

Nothing about the spirits they've encountered on this trip has been standard, but at this point Number Five is wondering whether the ghost of Jeremy Rice having _chemistry_ with Klaus is going to continue to be such an active deterrent to them getting the information they need. At least there's a shimmering of silver along that particular lurking cloud, which is knowing that Klaus is at least getting more practice interacting with the dead in a way that is neither horrifying nor demanding. Number Five still wants to keep in mind how suspicious it is that -- other than Ben -- Rice seems to be the most well-adjusted, reasonable ghost that Klaus has ever encountered, if not handicapped by some variation of ADHD. That, or he's doing a great job of putting on a show.

"The ethical problems aren’t a mystery," Klaus says suddenly, the shift in his tone so fluid that it takes Number Five a moment to realize he's speaking to him. "Who could blame him? The old man was like an ethics guidebook in reverse. No-- You didn't know him? No, I promise. He was worse. He was. No, he was worse, he really was that awful."

"Delightful man. May he rest in peace," says Diego suddenly from the back of the room by the door, agility having kept him from notifying his presence prematurely or spilling whatever he's got in the ceramic mug he's carrying. His surprise entrance was clearly on purpose.

Number Five doesn't startle. "What, did you get lost?" he says while Diego walks past him to hand the drink to Klaus. "What took you so long?"

"This is just from the kitchen sink," Diego says only to Klaus. "I tasted it. Seemed fine."

"I'm _sure_ I've had worse," Klaus says as he takes the cup, but doesn't drink yet. "I can't taste anything. This could be bathwater for all I know."

"I just told you it wasn't," Diego says with a grimace that says _What's wrong with you?_ and while Klaus takes a sip, Diego turns to Number Five, who shrugs when he says, "I had to go to the car. The house had no glasses, no bowls, no measuring cups, nothing." And out of the seven of them, who'd be the most likely to want to drink from a measuring cup? "So you better drink the whole thing."

"Florence Nightingale, what would I ever do without you?"

Klaus wasn't having trouble with the coffee this morning, but seeing him wince after gulping down a mouthful of cold tap water motivates Number Five to try and hurry up with their interview so they can get their information and leave. He hadn't been planning on staying out this long. Maybe Diego should've put the mug in the microwave before bringing it upstairs, he laments uselessly, before he takes the initiative to maneuver the conversation back on track.

"So," Number Five says as Klaus continues to try and soothe his weary vocal cords, "Warner jumped ship because he thought Dad was a villain."

Diego shrugs and says, "Warner was a smart man."

"Why did he keep in contact, then?" asks Klaus. His eyes fixate on the headboard while he lowers Diego's mug. "What kind of…" he says, then quickly slides his eyes over to look at Number Five, "...things did they talk about? Maybe you'd know it better," and then back to Rice, "unless you read their letters too?"

His voice fades out on the last word, prompting him to clear his throat and endure the pain of swallowing in an attempt to fix it with the water again.

"They were mostly exchanging information," Number Five begins, but he's barely halfway through his sentence before he's ordered to stop in his tracks.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait," Klaus says, holding both hands out in opposite directions. His cup is on the arm of the chair he's sitting on, balanced just as aimlessly as Klaus himself always seems to be. "One at a time, one at a time." He drops one arm and uses the other to point at the open air, so Number Five cans it.

There isn't much he and Diego can do to keep each other company amidst these silences. There's no way of knowing how long a Jeremy response is going to take or whether a short exchange between the two of them would be likely to distract Klaus. In the same vein, Number Five feels like he needs to keep an eye on _Klaus,_ who might be just as likely a distraction to the spirit. The nature of Rice's acquired status as Warner's right-hand man is starting to become murky, given how quickly and drastically he tends to relocate a topic. Were he giving Rice the benefit of the doubt, Number Five would guess that he's been bored and lonely and is just excited to have someone to be able to talk to, or maybe he's simply become fed up with talking about work, since it's fair to assume that'd been what took up most of his time while he was alive.

Something seems off about that, though. It's all too nice.

" _Jeremy_ says they were just absolutely lovely to each other," Klaus says. "Do you disagree?"

"Then he wasn't reading the same letters I was reading," Number Five says. "All of the exchanges in Dad's archive were purely clinical."

"Wow, are we all starting to feel some tension already?" Klaus says, teasing. His eyes ping-pong back and forth between them as he sips on groundwater like it's hot coffee, imploringly peering over the lip of the mug. "He wants to know what you mean by clinical."

"They didn't talk about anything other than work. It was never friendly," Number Five explains. "At the most they'd send findings and ideas that they thought were relevant to the other person's work every once in a while."

"Oh, isn't that something," Klaus says. Due to preoccupation or a graceful desire to let him save face, nobody says anything about his voice going higher as it breaks on the word _something._  "Miles and miles apart but still thinking of each other."

"If anything, it almost seemed like they were trying to compete," Number Five corrects. He crosses his arms. "Was Warner very boastful?"

"Uhh…" Klaus says. He pauses. "No. Nah. That's why he slipped away without wanting to take credit for anything, right? He must have been a real modest fellow."

" _Dad_ wasn't modest," Number Five says, "and his tone seemed to mirror Warner's almost perfectly -- in that there was no tone at all, only facts."

"There was a personable finesse in their language that you might not have picked up on," recites Klaus. "Says Jeremy! Not me. God, don't look at _me_ like that."

"Are you saying I can't interpret my own father's intonation?"

"Whoa, whoa, _okay,_ " says Klaus, eyes wider as he shakes his head for hyperbolic emphasis, "if you want to make a big ethereal mess then you have to just run along and go, like, play Bloody Mary, _Five,_ because I am _not_ going to be a vessel for your ghost argument, don't you even think about it. You sure are trying to make a lot of problems for me today."

His voice had cracked again. Diego steps in.

"Can you ask if there was a rhythm to their letters?" he asks Klaus smoothly, nudging at him to drink some more. Klaus looks annoyed and bats him off, but he pulls in another sip of water while Diego continues talking. "Maybe we can look for any gaps and see what else he was working on instead, or check to see if any of their notes had gotten lost."

Klaus takes a deep breath and another gulp of water. As he exhales, he swings his eyes up from the floor and toward Rice and sighs out, "Did you get all that?"

He coughs while he listens to Rice's answer, and his brothers idle while they listen to him cough. It doesn't go on for long; he's more than likely using the gap as an opportunity to scratch at the tickle in his throat and try to get it to feel a little less irritating. It's as though the stationary nature of the conversation and the allowance of being doted on has reminded him of his condition -- that is, if it hadn't coincidentally started to run out of stamina at that point in the day anyway. Either or.

"The only gap was in eighty-five," Klaus reports, "but Warner was on sabbatical then. I'm losing my voice, can you guys hear that?" He says it very suddenly and conversationally, like he'd just picked up an interesting rock off the beach or noticed a plane in the sky. "In a second you're all just going to have to talk amongst yourselves."

Number Five says, "You know that only goes one way, right?" followed by a pause for effect, not out of consideration. "Of course you do. You reminded me fifteen minutes ago."

"Okay, _Father Time,_ " says Klaus. He turns to where Rice must be, his hoarse tenor concerningly and characteristically jaunty. "Oh, _alright,_ for you? I can paraphrase for _you,_ it's just my-- What? Yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine." It sounds like the ghost must be pushing at something; Klaus is trying to resist a tone change like he always does when someone tries to get serious with him. "No, I just have a--" He halts, eyebrows drawing together as he frowns. "Yeah, uh, I think so. Everyone was saying that earlier. Why?"

"Is something wrong?" asks Diego.

"Are you serious, for real?" says Klaus to the ghost. "This again, really?"

Number Five sees Diego looking to him out of his periphery, so he looks up and to the side to find his brother mirroring his bewilderment.

"Diego," Klaus says, resting his head back against the chair and looking almost comically defeated. He shifts his gaze to the side, skeptical and inclusive. "Come and feel my forehead again. Big strong hands, buddy, let's go."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: hi everyone thought i would join in the fun and write a sickfic! i love colds :)  
> me a week later: guys i promise the ghost soap opera will come back to the periphery again. i love colds :)


	7. two story house [the action]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> get ready there is something cool in here! everybody talks a lot
> 
> by the way: somehow in this chapter i could not stop talking about how klaus is clumsy. i really went off with all these mentions of how he has no balance and loves to just drop stuff. spoiler warning he doesnt even do any of that in here but for some reason i guess i had to just remind everyone about it over and over again including right now

Did Rice seriously not know Klaus was sick? Number Five doesn't possibly understand how. Ten miles away would say just as much to even the daftest of the daft, and were they blind they wouldn’t even have to note the frequency of his sneezing, his sniffling, the bristling in his throat or the unflappable need to clear it, because the sticky, nasal quality of his voice alone would give it away in the very first word he spoke. There's no mistaking it when somebody sounds like that: they've either been crying profusely or they've got a cold.

Number Five can appreciate that sometimes, when a person comes down with something benign but nasty, it's only noticeable to those who know them well, to people who are used to their voice, attitude, and their posture, like Number Five and his siblings once were to one another and are starting to become again. This is absolutely not the case with Klaus, however, whose constant pressing and rubbing against his nose and eyes would give him away if the pinkness around their edges already didn't -- not to mention the way Diego has been fretting over him like a mother hen and pretending it's all force of habit. (From what Number Five remembers and what he's seen since he got back, Diego doesn't give that specific type of supposedly gruff, poorly-disguised hovering attention to anyone but Klaus.)

Rice’s inattention is astonishing. Where did he think that cough was coming from?

It's so obvious that it's barely worth acknowledging at all, unless it should become disruptive. And to Klaus' credit, it honestly barely has. He's been carrying the bug around like an accessory, his symptoms a nuisance but not enough to actually, truly inhibit him in a major way. Number Five wouldn't have brought him along if they were.

Upon hearing the request to once again play the part of a human thermometer, Diego takes a step toward Klaus and reaches his hand out, supplementing his approach when he asks, "Why? What's he saying?"

"Jeremy thinks my-- ohh,  _fuck,_ that feels good, okay, I get it now-- my fever is screwing with another ghost's head, the invisible one," Klaus says. He'd shuddered when Diego's skin made contact. "Or with my powers or something. What do we think, Nurse Bullseye? What's the verdict."

"You're always calling me nurse. Try doctor. I'd be a doctor," Diego says.

Klaus makes his eyes comically wide and mouths  _No you wouldn't_ as he points at him, the statement meant for Number Five to see, while shaking his head.

Diego looks like he's considering something, then he frowns and moves his hand. "I can't tell you-- I can't tell you the exact temperature," he says. Obviously. "You're a little warm, but you're fine. You're not burning up. I need my hand back, Klaus."

Klaus, who had grabbed Diego's wrist and decidedly stamped his hand on his cheek after Diego had taken it off of his forehead, says, "Okay! So that's, uh, I think that's not good."

"What's not good about it?" Number Five asks. "You don't  _want_ a high fever. Have they affected your powers before?"

"I  _know_ high fevers," Klaus says. "I am so intimately familiar with high fevers. Detox puts me," he raises his hand, drawing a steep incline, "all the way up there. I'm talking for a few days. You can't ignore one of those, it fucks with you, it does all sorts of things."

"And have  _those_  affected your powers?" asks Number Five.

"Sort of. I don't know," Klaus says. "To be honest with you I wasn't really paying all that much attention."

That gives Number Five pause just in time before he instinctively asks  _Why not?_ _,_  because it's pretty clear why not: because of the addiction, because of the way its withdrawals intermingle his legitimate visions with their hallucinations, and because of the slick physical volatility splitting his consciousness every which way. Because of the active, all-encompassing desire to corrode his powers and all that might come with them. Well, that's just about right, isn't it. None of that was very long ago.

"This is the first time you've really had anything internally wrong with your body since you got clean," reflects Diego. "So it's your first time in fifteen years seeing what sorts of organic circumstances might affect them."

"Is this whole thing really so delicate that all it takes is a little cold to knock it off balance?" says Klaus, sounding as though he thinks it should be a surprise. Number Five isn't sure who he's asking.

"It makes sense," Number Five says anyway, because showing he has the answer is more important than responding to the way Klaus downplays any of his indispositions whenever he decides it's convenient. "They seem to be sensitive in general; it worked that well with the drugs. Anything that changes your senses or perceptions seems to be enough to alter their effects in one way or another, even marginally."

"Yeah," Klaus says, endurance waning. He drains what's left in the mug, turning it upside down as he tips his head back. "So why am I able to see you, then? Why can I talk to you?" Klaus asks Rice, then clears his throat and nods in understanding and says, "Oh, yeah, okay. Oh, sure."

"What?" Diego asks.

"He doesn't know," says Klaus.

"Of course," comments Number Five.

"You could see  _Ben_ while you were high, though, couldn't you?" asks Diego.

Klaus clears his throat again, but it doesn't help the raspy dimness in his voice. "That's a mystery to us too. I think everything about my powers is a little different with Ben."

"Lot of theories about that one," comments Number Five.

But they aren't going to get into that right now.

"All right," Klaus declares promptly. "You guys are gonna have to stop making me talk to you. Pipes are almost cashed."

Diego, reasonably, looks troubled. In which direction Number Five isn't quite sure.

"That just makes the rest of us sitting ducks," he says, like he's about to problem-solve but has no idea where to start.

As usual, Number Five does. "Give me a minute," he says, calmly taking a solid step forward and holding out his hand. Klaus passes the mug over without him having to ask, and Number Five blinks himself down to the kitchen. There's a reason he's at the forefront of the investigation and it isn't solely interest.

The tap sputters when he turns it on, a gritty cascade from a rusted pipe, and he has to wait for a moment until it starts to run clear. Number Five doesn't trust the hot water heater and leaves the knob on cold, then shuts the faucet off just before the mug fills up enough to start to splash.

The stove probably isn't safe and would waste too much time regardless, so Number Five makes use of the microwave until the water is steaming. He doesn't bother to check and see whether the ceramic is microwave-safe or whether there's some luxury in the pantry that he can use to flavor it, like tea leaves or cocoa powder. In fact, he's avoiding looking in that direction altogether, even though he knows he isn't really at fault for the disarray and doesn't plan on returning to it; the renovators should have done a better job at evicting any and all necessary documents when modifying the building into a single-family home. They'll be the ones to hire a cleaning crew if its new inhabitants are bothered by it. It's not his problem.

Even so, it's not worth the trouble of ferreting about to find a culinary enhancement that his brother won't even be able to taste. Instead, while he waits, Number Five crosses his arms and watches the microwave without wondering what's going on upstairs. It's probably a good sign that he can't hear anything from upstairs, and then it doesn't matter because all he can hear is the shrill signaling of the microwave announcing that the drink is good and hot. He doesn't have anything to stir it with, knowing microwaves don't heat liquids evenly, but his infallible intuition says it'll do the trick just like the latte had done this morning.

When Number Five and his improvisational home remedy return to the master bedroom, Klaus is sneezing behind one of those insubstantial, patterned paper towels, the kind that are always suspiciously on sale at the supermarket and tend to uselessly melt and disintegrate into spills instead of cleaning them up. Number Five has no idea where he got it, because he certainly didn't bring it from home.

"Gesundheit," he says politely and pointedly upon his arrival, placing himself back into the situation with ease.

"Jesus  _Christ,_ " says Klaus, hand on his chest and articulation muffled by the flimsy cloth. "Why does everybody love sneaking up on people so much?"

Number Five holds out the drink, deciding Klaus doesn't need an answer.

"This should get you back up to speed," he offers. His own hands had become warm in the few seconds it took him to transport it.

In between the two long breaths he uses to blow his nose, Klaus says, "You could all just use the stairs." And then afterward while he roughly swipes underneath the septum: "Or walk with actual footsteps like a normal person."

"Takes too long," Number Five says.

"Second nature," Diego says. "What's in the cup?"

"Some sort of  _elixir,_ " Klaus says once he finally takes the heavy ceramic mug from Number Five. He tips it for inspection, peering inside and making Number Five worry that he's going to spill. Klaus doesn't exactly have the steadiest hands.

"It's just microwaved water from the faucet," corrects Number Five. Then, because finally it's gotten to a point where he really can't not say something about it, he adds, "You sound horrible."

"Yet here we all are," says Klaus instantly, his tone falsely contemplative as he gestures lazily with his free hand.

Touché.

Klaus flinches when he tries to dive into the drink too hastily, its heat threatening to scald his mouth to punish his lack of impulse control. Number Five didn't think he'd have to warn him about something like that, but Klaus' penchant for chaos tends to show up even in the grout of his behavior.

As Klaus amends his technique and sips carefully, Diego asks, "Is it helping?"

"Well, I'm loving the steam," Klaus says with a nod to Number Five. "Really good for my pores. Terrific work, Five, everything's been so chapped lately."

"Not my intention," says Number Five, "but congratulations. How is it on your throat?"

Klaus takes a long sip, loud and slow, then hums and clears his throat to test it. "I think I'll be good," he says, then drinks again and looks at the bed. " _You_ are gonna have to go easy with the monologues, though, or I'm condensing your words like mushroom soup. You're Paris… and I'm TMZ. Don't say so much at once. But you guys," he gestures toward his brothers, "I don't care what you do. Wait. Yes I do. Just-- okay, try to give him yes-or-no options, at least until I'm done drinking Five’s magic potion."

It feels strange taking orders from Klaus, who isn't much of a leader and doesn’t ever seem interested in trying to be; he's far too too wayward in nature to care about imposing rules or directing a structured collaboration, always indifferent toward authority whether it's being offered or imposed. It just isn't him. Never has been.

But Number Five has a lot he wants to ask, so he isn't wasting any time by lamenting on his Klaus and his benevolent fluidity.

"All right. Who are the other spirits?" he asks directly.

Klaus, unimpressed, sighs and makes a hurry-up motion with his right hand.

"Fine.  _Did_ Rice and the invisible spirit know each other in waking life?" he revises.

“No,” Klaus says after a moment. “It was already fucking around when he got here.”

The surprise of the answer expands Number Five's curiosity about the space tenfold. Going into the mission, he'd assumed that Warner had been the only spirit inhabiting the refurbished country home and it'd be a quick and easy in-and-out for the three of them. Instead, they'd been introduced to a whole slew of everlasting occupants as well as a possibility that there may have been some sort of interference with anything that made it out of Warner's office. Those implications, combined with the group's momentary restrictions on verbosity, launch Diego, Rice, and himself into a state of rapid-fire dialogue with Klaus caught oscillating between them, sipping on hot water and playing the part of a beacon’s rotating lamp during a thunderstorm at sea.

"Did it feel like it was here before he died?" starts Number Five.

"Sometimes."

"How? What were the symptoms?"

"Usual methodology. Opening drawers, weird drafts, feeling watched. Sounds."

That could be anything; if it were significant, it would have been in the letters. "Is he sure it wasn't just the effects of inhabiting an older building?"

"Uh, obviously not, because there  _did_  turn out to be a ghost here."

"What about the old woman?"

"Middle-aged."

"The middle-aged woman."

"No, she's new, she's newer."

"How new?"

"Five years?” He says it like he’s recalling an experience instead of repeating another person's statement. "Ten years?"

"He doesn't know?"

"Not easy to keep time when you're ageless… and homebound… and too intangible to mark a calendar."

"Fair enough. Does she speak?"

"What? Yes she  _speaks_ , of course she speaks."

"You answered that awfully fast for never having heard a peep out of her. Has Rice spoken to her?"

"You could just ask him yourself," Klaus says. He sounds almost mortified, for some reason.

"What are you talking about?"

"Seriously?" And scandalized. "Seriously. Both of you have been so rude this entire time."

" _How?_ "

Klaus looks at the both of them with genuine, challenging surprise. "He  _has_  to speak through me," he says. "You don't. You know he can hear you so you can just-- you can just ask him."

"That's…"

"Oh my God. Did you not even realize?" Klaus takes a second to study Number Five and Diego's faces as they reanalyze the situation. " _Wow._ You didn’t! No social skills in this family.  _Really!_ "

"Okay, okay," says Diego's ego. "You're certainly one to talk."

"Excuse you? Total ghost glitterati over here. A spectral full-on socialite; I'm like the  _coup de foudre_ to ghosts."

Without a redirection he'll just keep going, so Number Five pulls Klaus back where he belongs and continues the conversation with careful modifications. "All right, enough. Save your voice.  _Jeremy,_ have you interacted very much with your deceased not-wife?"

"Heh. He says not really."

"Why is that funny?"

"I think he just avoids her."

"Fine. Sure. What about the other man, did you know him?"

Klaus takes another moment. "Aww. He says they were buddies."

"Really." By whose standards, Number Five wonders, because he doubts Rice had attested to this in so many words.

"He was Vincent's other assistant. They had alternating shifts so they just left each other notes in the shared desk. Sounds like flirting. Were you flirting? He says no."

"Then quit shaking your head 'yes' and stay on topic. Do they interact at all now?"

Klaus opens his mouth, but then pulls his jaw back and lets it hang there while he listens, rapt and frozen. Eventually, he says, "…Whoa."

"What?"

"Lady Ghost is keeping the other assistant out of the bedroom, so they've been  _separated._ Oh, I bet you miss him."  There's an omen for a detour in the smatterings of tenderness that are beginning to bleed into his voice.

"Did they do any independent work together while they were alive?"

" _Hello,_  whiplash? We're talking about a love story right now."

"You can talk about that later." Surprise, surprise. " _Jeremy,_ did Warner have the both of you working on the same projects, or did he separate his work into night and day?"

"Hmm. That's interesting." The ends of Klaus' mouth twist as the middle arches upward in a thoughtful frown.

"What?"

"Never worked on the same team. The boss kept them on different tracks."

"That is interesting."

"Yeah."

"Did Warner ever give the assistants any information about what the other was working on?"

"No. Weird. He kept the teams in the dark about each other."

“Did the other members of the team have fixed-- bless you-- assignments as well? Bless you.”

“Thank you.”

“Mm.”

“Uh-- He-- sorry, hang on-- He says everyone else could rotate. The projects weren't secret or anything, Jeremy and Wilson were the only components he kept separated.”

"Did you tell each other the details anyway?"

"Jeremy and Wilson?"

"Yes."

"Yes."

"Klaus, where in the room is  _he_  right now? I don't particularly enjoy talking to the floor but if I make eye contact with  _you_ it feels like I'm talking to you."

"Yes, I don't like that either. He's up there."

"Where?"

"Nope, just moved. Stop moving. Would you sit still? Jesus, okay. Thank you. Okay. All right, now, big brother, you see where I'm pointing? Over-- Follow my-- you got it! That pillow by the headboard, right over there."

"Right in the middle?"

"Perfect."

"Will you tell us if he moves?"

"No."

"No?"

"No," repeats Klaus, and it's uncommon to see him being so direct. "That wouldn't make a difference to you. Just keep looking at the bed and pretend he's there, he likes that spot the most."

"Fine."

"It is fine."

"Were the concurring projects ever related to each other?"

"He's thinking." Klaus tilts his head like he's thinking, too. "Umm. Not really. Sometimes? No, not really. Not really at all."

"No?"

"Yeah, he says no."

"Think we can get a couple examples?"

"Okay wait."

"It was a while back. Take your time."

"No, I just…" Klaus goes up and down, up and down, then he fades.

"Bless you, bless you."

"Jesus  _Christ._ See? I told you they keep coming in those pairs, so you just have to be-- to be patient with that. Thank you. Oh-- okay, thanks. Sorry; whaaaat did you want to know about the research?"

Diego smiles, eyes fixed downward. "We wanted examples. Of two projects were going on at the same time?"

"Gene tagging and interviews with the families of the  _Challenger_ crew."

"Pretty wide breadth of focus. Are you okay?"

"I'm great."

"Well, obviously that's not--"

"I'm fine. It's just my…"

"Uh-huh. You sure?"

"I'm fine.  _Doctor_  Vincent, uh, he used to work on genetics stuff for Dad, who was getting him more involved with space exploration a few years before he quit. Guess he kept up with the interest, just…"

"More so the humanitarian side of it."

"Yep."

"Did he like to keep consistency on which subject he assigned each of his assistants?"

"No. But Jeremy liked all of the biological studies a lot more. Haha, I bet you did."

"Do you think you might be able to talk to… What was his name? The other guy?"

"Wilson."

"Right. Wilson."

"I don't know, he was pretty evasive before. What do you think?" He raises his eyebrows up, eyes bright, half-lidded and focused on a spot by one of the plants. "Do you think he might know more than you about your boss and my dad's secret liaison?"

"Klaus, that isn't what it was."

"Says you. You weren't there."

" _None of us_ were there."

"Jeremy says to go and try Wilson," deflects Klaus. "I think he's bored of us."

"He's  _bored?_ " asks Five.

"He's bored," repeats Diego, though that counts as a question, too.

"He wants to go back to… brooding out the window or something.  _Oh,_ yes you do, what else do you even get up to around here?! That's all there is for you. I've seen what it's like.  _I_ know. Don't you act like you think I don't know."

"I've never heard about ghosts getting bored. You'd think their desperation to be heard would take a lot longer to be satisfied."

"He didn't even  _want_ to be heard, remember? That other freaky one dragged us in here."

"Still."

"He says he's tired. I mean, that's fine. We can go and try to find Wilson, I guess."

"What does a _ghost_ have to do to wear himself out?"

"Some of them probably have like, ghost stamina or something, or like, ghost strength, maybe, something like that." Klaus doesn’t seem to know either, looking right up at the crackly white ceiling like it has an answer.

"And his is…?"

"His is just toast at this point, man, it's fried."

"How are you doing?"

"You want to know how  _I'm_  doing?"

"Of course I do. Your voice sounds better; you're not coughing so much."

"Uh-huh, well, for now. My throat was  _so_ dry, but everything just keeps alternating between here… and here. Now instead of that I keep thinking that maybe I might have to  _sneeze_  but then usually-- 'nope, forget it'. I wish it'd just pick a side and stay in one place. Maybe even away from me and my body."

"Last I checked that's all pretty standard for a cold."

"Well, remind me not to get another one."

"Did the hot water help?"

"Yeah, I actually think it's really-- helping-- Oh, whoa, _actually,_  you know what. Oh, fuck."

"What?"

"Come touch this. You're going to hate it."

To illustrate his adjourning of the conversation, Klaus unfolds himself from the twist of soft fabric and elegant metal and spindly limbs he's transformed into on his chair. As much as he loves to contort his body on  _regular_  furniture to make up for a lack of access to an inappropriate resting surface, Klaus doesn't usually keep himself anchored in one position for so long, and the result of the shift in his eccentricity shows. He looks surprised at the tightness in his joints as he stretches, unsteadily extending an arm to offer the mug he's been delicately cradling for the entirety of their exchange.

More so than any other mission, this trip has had Number Five and Diego touching Klaus and his things ad nauseam. His sparsely elevated temperature is the chief reason why, but that comes with the flavorless irony of it being only one of the facets of Klaus that's practically radiating contagion. Fortunately, and despite the way they were raised, neither Number Five nor Diego has ever had a particularly weak constitution.

Klaus nods toward the cup and gestures for Number Five to take it back. It's got to be lukewarm by now, no longer emitting steam or providing relief from the tenderness in his throat. A look inside tells Number Five that it's half full, which isn't surprising because Klaus had gotten distracted early on and doesn't usually have the foresight to realize how quickly things can go stale.

However, once his palms touch the just-microwaved ceramic, Number Five frowns and says, "Ah, shit. Again?"

"What?" asks Diego.

"The  _cup_ is freezing cold," reports Number Five.

"You're kidding," Diego says.

"Not kidding," Number Five says.

"Shit."

Diego, stiff and determined, plays his (self-appointed) role and starts to mosey right on over.

"Oh, are we gonna hold hands again?" asks Klaus.

"Shut up."

Klaus rolls his eyes, probably in good nature, but Number Five can't tell, and offers up his hand -- the left one this time, the one that'd been holding the mug -- like a debutante, wrist slack and fingers pointed down. He sniffles briskly.

Exactly as soon as he makes contact, Diego's tentative expression shifts into one of flagrant alarm.

"It's like…" He grabs the other hand and doesn't look pleased. "Blinking."

"Let me see," demands Number Five, because all of that is his job too. He snatches Klaus' left hand from Diego, enclosing it between the insides of his own two palms, and feels the cold spot rapidly blinking like a hysterical wintry pulse. The top of Klaus' hand is still warm. "Other one."

Diego releases the  _HELLO,_  and Number Five checks that one too. Same story.

" _Ugh,_ " Klaus groans, tossing his head back, projecting his voice into the atmosphere and making his exasperation crystal clear the way a child does when a parent assigns them extra chores before allowing them to go outside. " _What?_ What do you want?"

"How about Rice? About Jeremy," Diego asks. "He still around? Can  _he_ see anything?"

Klaus retrieves his own hands and floats them both up to his cheeks to try and participate first, but then he sighs. The experiment must once again prove ineffective in the same way checking one's own temperature might be, despite the chill on his palms measuring drastically different to the heat of his face. Klaus yields.

"Jeremy, _helloooo…!_ I need you to come back for a second, hello, wherever you-- Great! Yes, all right, thank you. Was that me, did I conjure you just now? No? Nope. Okay, great. Okay, fine."

He pats his cheeks back and forth, one-two-one-two-one-two-one, like he used to do sometimes when he was trying to sober up. Number Five wonders whether the spirit can hold on while he's doing that, or if that's even the reason he tried.

"We're going to need a-- Yes, I  _know,_ yes I know -- sorry, sorry, sorry -- but just one thing. Just one more-- Yes, just one more thing from you, all right, old friend? Then you can get lost and take your… ghost nap or whatever it is. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Okay? Okay."

"Okay?" tests Number Five.

Klaus nods at the two of them (okay) as he drops his hands, put his elbows on his knees. With the preciousness of his full engagement reflected on his face, Klaus tips up his chin and slouches forward to speak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> diego: hey klaus i'll get you some water  
> five: omgggg are you his doctor or something???? sheesh! extra much? that's enough mr mother hen. you're smothering him
> 
>  
> 
> heres the thing everybody. five is, for a couple reasons, able to detect sooo many more details about klaus' symptoms (did you notice??) and i think that's why he seems sicker in these. but the fun of it is that five doesn't really have anything to say about it (he is thinking: what is there to say?) while diego has the aptitude to check on him every once in a while. great communication! great team!


	8. chair in the bedroom {the emancipation}

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i never think of myself as a person with an interest in ghosts but my very specific affinity for psychics is so strong that i accidentally learned a bunch of ghost lore over the years anyway because i'm not creative enough to come up with this stuff on my own

Jeremy Rice is one of those high-strung, pretentious, dweeby old-fashioned Type-A neurotics who seem like total Puritan assholes all the time but are actually just really shy. Most people don't figure out the truth about them because nobody has the time to put into unwinding a person who comes off so standoffish, so it’s kind of on them if everyone assumes their resting bitch face is precisely all it's cracked up to be.

The thing about people like Jeremy is that they are _so_ regrettably and radically misleading until you've known one of them and can recognize the signs. People like Jeremy -- reserved, starchy, and tense, but quick to respond when spoken to and eager to mirror your body language -- are the type of people who have so obviously got jokes in them that nobody has ever tried to bring out.

People like Jeremy, Klaus knows from experience, are chock full of potential for a great time. All it takes is a tiny little inviting tug to set their secret spirits free. The meek of that particular flavor are spectacularly fun to tease, because they slip into a rhythm of readiness, thrilled by all of the poking and unexpectedly throwing it back almost just as soon as they realize they're allowed, even though being treated with any degree of liveliness seems to shock them miles away from their comfort zone no matter how many times Klaus tries to get them used to the game.

He isn't very calculated about it -- not only because being calculated about anything seems impossible and boring (and impossibly boring), but because Klaus' naturally charming social conduct already tends to relax the right ones down to that sweet spot without him really having to consciously try to get them there.

It is, admittedly, a little different with Jeremy because he's not actually alive. Everything's different with ghosts, no exceptions, even with normal-seeming ones like Ben. There's always some quirk, something a little bit off when you look really, really close, not that Klaus often does because most of the time all they have to exhibit is physical and emotional misery. And while Jeremy doesn't seem to be despairing or ruminating to the extent that most other corpses do, he is sort of a sad sack.

"You need to stop looking at me like that. We're all tired, _Jeremy,_ you know, we've all got places we'd rather be, realms we'd rather sulk in," Klaus is saying to him, because you can't be too gentle with sad sacks or they'll just become sadder and sackier; they'll droop into all the sympathy you give them until they're sullen grey puddles on the drab and companionable floor. Though Klaus' interactions with Jeremy, up to this point, have been entirely based on instinct rather than thoughtfulness, he knows he isn't going to trap himself on the other side of one of those I'm-here-for-you-I'll-watch-you-wallow situations again. "It's okay! All right? We'll let you go in a minute."

Jeremy, who is actually pretty hot for a corpse and looks like Audrey Hepburn might if she were a dude with a creepy cardigan and the most terrible sideburns ever, just crosses his pitiful tweed arms at him.

"I'm afraid there won't be much I can do for you," he says, and Klaus can tell in his tone that he wants to convey indignation, but it comes across as apologetic instead. Poor guy. He unfortunately sounds like an older version of the kid from _Arrested Development,_ a program that had accidentally been embedded into the aural portion of Klaus' brain by Vanya, who used to watch it in the living room most mornings when they were fifteen. She'd never minded that it was the same place he liked to come home to black out at on the nights before, and somehow, she wasn't bothered by his slow, muzzy presence as he came to with a hangover and no choice but to listen to that smart-ass narrator piercing through the wool and needles in his head. Against his will, Klaus came to consider the sardonic commentary a constant during that period in their lives.  

Back then, he was starting to dig his heels into the ground of a comforting and unsafe direction while flying away from the hazardous familiar, which he now realizes looks like the inverse of his odyssey as of late. Strange how things can come full circle like that. In a Pavlovian way, Jeremy Rice sort of reminds Klaus of that time, not through any fault of his own.

"Wow, presumptuous," Klaus accuses of him. "You don't even know that yet."

Jeremy is also a lot less humble than most ghosts are, the dead man somehow managing to be simultaneously argumentative _and_ evasive which contrasts with the hysterical, pleading compliance Klaus is used to receiving from his kind once they realize he can see them. At times Jeremy acts like Klaus is the one bothering _him,_ which is, in all honesty, a refreshing delight, though he doesn't seem to mind idle chatter. Klaus wonders what that's all about, but there's not a lot of time to explore the late scientist's likes and dislikes, as much as he might wish to. There's a curiosity there that Klaus had never even come close to nurturing before.

He continues with his coaxing, saying, "It's just another question."

"Questions, questions, you know, I'm getting tired of all your questions," mumbles Jeremy performatively. He keeps saying he's tired of everything, so much so that Klaus has come to assume it's just a tic along with all his pouting, the cornucopia of haplessness existing as the result of nothing more than a bad habit. He seems to enjoy pouting just for the sake of being told not to pout.

" _Oh,_ no you're not!" challenges Klaus. Raising his voice almost cracks it again, _fuck,_ he forgot, so he clears his throat very carefully to keep from needing to cough. More softly, he says, "Look at you standing there like that. Right? You love them."

"I don't," argues Jeremy. He does, though, actually, because he smiles about it while he shakes his head.

Klaus coughs then anyway, only twice before he very purposefully clears his throat to try and halt the nonsense before it begins as his chest starts to tickle threateningly. As much as he'd love to see Five run another errand for him, the scraping ache in his throat wouldn't be a worthy sacrifice.

"Okay," he says, "Jeremy, you know that other ghost who keeps pressing on my--"

"Pressing on your palms," Jeremy guesses way too fast. His face has become so serious. Yikes.

"Yeah, pressing on my palms," Klaus says, keeping his voice even so Jeremy doesn't get any ammo to start freaking out. (That's his favorite, apparently, but Klaus could do without it.) He sees Diego nodding at him from all the way over by the dresser as though Klaus needs confirmation that that's really what's been happening, and maybe he does _,_ since it's not like he can prove any of it for himself. There's no temperature change, no pressure, no voice, no visual, no strange all-encompassing ominous feeling hanging in the sodden musty air; there's absolutely nothing for Klaus to go off of other than his brothers' blood-curdled reactions, and Diego and Five, for better or for worse, aren't really known to play those types of pranks. "Is he in here right now? Why didn't you say anything?"

"He is? He's here?" asks Five eagerly.

"He hasn't answered yet," Klaus says.

"Because you asked me _two_ questions," Jeremy says.

Well, whatever. "Yes, now it's your turn, you get to give me two answers," Klaus says, leaning back and crossing his arms to show Jeremy that he's waiting patiently. Adopting the stance feels less relaxing than he'd expected it to, and the transition into it reminds Klaus of how heavy and foreign his body feels. People always describe the viral version of fatigue as something that presses on their shoulders and makes their limbs feel like lead, but to Klaus it only seems like gravity everywhere has been turned a few notches to the right and whatever tethers him to the awareness of his corporeal form has gotten just a bit thinner. As long as he doesn't move very much, it's not so bad, so hopefully nothing too exciting will happen and everyone will let him stay in this chair until it's time to leave.

"I can't see him," confesses Jeremy. "But--"

"He can't see him," Klaus echoes for the sake of his brothers, who keep looking at him like they're at a restaurant and Klaus is their waiter just coming out of the kitchen carrying a tray of food that may not even be theirs. "But is he here?"

"Well--"

"He is," Klaus says. "He has to be, right?"

"Please," says Jeremy, who hates being talked over just as much as he loves to talk over others, his impatience borne out of anxiety rather than self-importance. He's so hurried and fretful about everything; he reminds Klaus of one of those cartoon rabbits. What does he even have to fret about, Klaus wonders, stuck in here all day with no ambition to escape? Or was that what made him this way in the first place?

Klaus does the graceful thing and relents, because he'd like to know about the tactile ghost too, and he extends his arm and flips it over as if to say _after you._ On a better day, he might bend at the waist, give stuck-up foxy Jeremy the full bow and everything, but moving his head that much would change the orientation of all the pressure built up inside of it and he doesn't need one of those inside-the-face headaches layered over the preexisting inside-the-face tingling and heat and dry, dry soreness. The more he stays out of bed and in this damp and drafty house -- the kind of environment he wouldn't have noticed one bit two months ago, when his gauge of temperature was most often numbed entirely -- the worse it's starting to feel.

Through all of that, Klaus is able to relay Jeremy's spiel to his brothers. He says something about a mass form of energy becoming concentrated in all the expected places (Klaus holds up his right hand and points at it with his left, inquisitive, and Jeremy nods) and how despite its presence being loud and sometimes all-consuming, the spirit has never actually manifested or appeared to any of them in the form of a body.

"So you've never seen him?" asks Klaus.

"Not even right now?" adds Five, but Klaus needs to ignore him for a second.

"No, I haven't," says Jeremy. Klaus wishes he wouldn't pace like that. It's quite dizzying, and also a bit sad because it reminds Klaus of those pent up leopards at the zoo, born to run but captured to toil. "But his presence is certainly strong. I'm surprised _you_ aren't able to sense it. Most of the living can."

"I'm not able to sense anything," Klaus reminds him, gesturing to his face and reminiscing on all of its recent mishaps. "Just, you know, in general. The whole thing's out of whack. The _whoooole_ system. I told you guys it'd be screwed up, you got what you bargained for."

"So the ghost is the one who's been causing all of the physical trouble?" asks Diego. "The stove, the shoving…?"

"Yes," says Jeremy.

"Yes," repeats Klaus.

"None of that was the rest of you?"

"No!" Jeremy looks horrified, which is lame of him because it wouldn't be that big a deal if he did. "No, of course not."

"Nope, just him," Klaus confirms plainly to get Jeremy to calm down.

"Sounds like a poltergeist," comments Diego.

Jeremy stops in his tracks and squints, his body language changing from a representation of ardent defensiveness to self-conscious dread. "I don't know what that is," he says, looking first at Diego and then over at Klaus, who can hear in his voice the same quality of senseless anxiety that someone expresses when they're about to take a test they didn't study for.

"Really?" Klaus asks. "You've never seen the movies? Like, not any of them? There are so many."

"Would you be asking me that if I were alive? You sound prejudiced," says Jeremy.

Klaus smiles, just briefly, because Jeremy's a blast, and then he thinks about that for a moment. He hadn't been confident going in that he knew very much about ghosts and how they operate, and even with his family there for morale, he doesn't really want to find out very fast. But Jeremy has been a surprise. He's so easy. And he's joking, too, but that's often when people are most insightful, because it relaxes them enough to let all their thoughts show up loose and honest. There's something comforting about knowing that some corpses are so approachable, especially considering the mass repugnancy of the others Klaus has been trying to confront.

"I get to be prejudiced," Klaus finally decides.

"Who's being prejudiced?" asks Five, even though it's none of his business. He's upset because he thinks they might be having fun again. Klaus waves him off.

"I don't look like the kind of man who watches a lot of horror films, do I?" asks Jeremy. Of course he doesn't, and he knows it.

"No. You look like the kind who maybe needs to, though," Klaus says. "Wilson never took you to the drive-in?"

Jeremy looks startled but otherwise unreadable. Klaus has been trying to figure out what was up with him and Wilson but he gets so cagey about it.

"Klaus," says Diego the Misanthropist of Love, pushy and expectant as he sides with their ancient little brother and his leisure-hating tunnel vision. Alright already.

"Yeah," Klaus answers.

"Yeah…?" Diego prompts.

"Okay, okay okay." Klaus sighs. "How about this. Can _you_ explain the concept of a poltergeist to the class, Diego? Teach Jeremy a little about his heritage?"

And while Diego blindly enlightens Jeremy on the chronicles of Carol Anne Freeling, Klaus allows himself a much needed break to haptically explore the intricacies of his new jewelry, ignore the itchy cotton in his head, and tune out his deflated fevered brain. He hasn't seen any of the movies because he's been forced to take more than enough of that every time he closes his eyes, but through cultural osmosis he's pretty sure he's learned the gist. Diego, Ben, and Allison used to have movie nights every once in a while in their early adolescence, and they'd crowd around the TV in the dark while everybody else would escape into their respective evenings to memorize Tchaikovsky or bench press three thousand pounds or get high. Once in a while, across the thin walls and high ceilings of the Hargreeves mansion, their experiences would join together as they listened to the Steven Spielberg Trio scream together in terrorized glee.

Five had disappeared about a year before all of that started, though Klaus couldn't guarantee that he would have joined them anyway. It always seemed like fun, nice and cozy and communal like a real family might be, but by the time their prick-of-the-century adoptive father allowed them the freedom to do things like that, Klaus was already too far gone.

He wouldn't mind something like that tonight, so long as the content were different and he hadn't already passed out into a fragile, open-mouthed stupor by virtue of his traitorous sinuses and all that they stand for by then. It's a fair gamble.

"…and I don't think that's what they're called," Jeremy says, and Klaus realizes he'd missed part of what he was supposed to feed to Five and Diego and is going to need to ask Jeremy to repeat himself.

"Sorry, what?" he says.

"I don't think this spirit calls itself that," says Jeremy. "Or calls itself, uh, anything."

"I know, but-- before that-- what did you say?"

"Did you space out?" apprehends Five.

"I'm sick, I'm allowed. Wait," Klaus says, turning back to Jeremy, "hang on a second. You said 'itself'?"

"Yes, I did."

"Why were you saying 'he' before? Was it because we called it 'he'?"

"It was; I was acclimating. I was being polite.”

“That’s polite?”

“Yes. The spirit doesn't seem at all… Well, what's a good way to describe…?"

"I don't know, Jeremy."

"…Anthropoid. I suspect it consists of a very complicated essence and is very, very old."

"Oh, shit. Okay. Weird. That's kind of cool."

"What is?" asks Five.

"He says the spirit isn't usually…" reminiscent of a person at all, Klaus want to say, but he needs a moment to choke on his lungs for no reason first. Sometimes the air just hits them the wrong way when he inhales, which he would have expected to get used to after a couple of days, but it's only becoming more and more irritating. Something about being sick that people don't complain enough about is all of the _waiting_ that comes with it. This time it only goes on for a couple of seconds, but it feels so much longer when it gets in the way like that. He's busy. "Isn't actually behaving like a _ghost-_ ghost, like, it isn't the ghost of a person anymore, it's too old. How old would you say?"

Jeremy shrugs.

"Just an estimate," Klaus encourages.

"Centuries, I think," Jeremy tells him.

"Centuries!" Klaus repeats emphatically.

"Easy," Diego hushes.

"At least half a dozen," Jeremy extrapolates.

"Six _hundred_ years," Klaus says, "maybe older."

"And is it in the room with us now?" asks Five.

Instead of answering, Jeremy says, "Ask them if they can feel it."

"He wants to know if you can feel it."

Five and Diego share one of those _looks,_ the kind that means they're bonding over being the only normal ones in a house of freaks but are about to yield to the freaks anyway. Klaus twitches a nod at them, prompting a response with his raised eyebrows.

"What are we supposed to be feeling, exactly?" asks Diego. "Other than those spots on your hands. Any idea why it was trying to say hello so badly?"

"No, I don't know," says Jeremy, so Klaus shakes his head, "but I can't feel it either, which probably means it isn't with us right now."

"Do you know where it is? Can it be in two places at once?" asks Klaus.

"No, I don't know," Jeremy says again.

"He doesn't know."

Klaus presses against his forehead as he pulls both hands down his face, taking extra time to rub his dry, burning eyes, and inhales sharply through his nose, wet and strangled, as his hands drag down his cheeks. It always feels like he'll be able to reset his face if he touches it enough, but all it does is make him want to use his arms as a pillow and fall asleep on the floor. He doesn't even remember exactly why they came here in the first place, but it feels like nothing but a bunch of dead ends and the fruitlessness is exhausting.

"Does it show up often?" asks Diego at the same time that Five says, "Is there a pattern to its appearances?"

"Only with flesh and blood in the house," answers that weirdo Jeremy.

"Ew, did you have to say it like that, though?" Klaus asks.

Five frowns. "How did he say it?"

"How would you rather I described the lot of you?" asks Jeremy. He's good at this.

But Klaus declines the bait. In response, he turns away from him toward Five and says, "The polter--" and clears his throat, "--geist, sorry, only really shows up when people are in the house."

"Now that's interesting," says Five. Yeah, maybe. "And does it stick around?"

"It comes and goes," Jeremy says. "The beginning is always the rowdiest."

"It doesn't go away," Klaus rephrases, because repeating Jeremy word for word reminds him too much of cruel mimicry, "but it's really mostly there in the beginning."

"Sounds like a threat," says Diego. He would. "Is it trying to get us to leave?"

Jeremy, for some reason, is wearing the same face Luther would always make when Ben had challenged him and Allison tried to fill out one of the pages in his riddle books, like this is the first time he's thought about any of it in that direction at all. What is with this guy? All those years living with a mysteriously powerful spirit and he'd never once considered its motives.

"No, I don't think so," he says finally.

"It's not?" Klaus asks. His nose is running. "Then what is it doing?"

That paper towel from downstairs is starting to feel like fiberglass against the skin in the middle of his face, and it almost stings when he holds it, scrunched loosely in his hand, against the underside of his nose and then presses upward to manage it. The area is probably going pink by now, but he'd rather deal with that than put up with sniffling through another conversation. It's not something he would ordinarily mind too much, but he's sick of it now that it keeps happening.

"It could be anything, it could even be inclined toward chaos," says Jeremy.

"He says he doesn't know," Klaus tells his brothers, then he artlessly steeples the abrasive sheet of paper and blows his nose.

Jeremy holds out a hand, horizontal and palm-up, incensed. "That isn't what I said."

"It must be an agent of entropy," suggests Five.

Klaus directs his imploring eyes toward Jeremy, who doesn't look impressed. While he crushes the paper towel into a ball -- it's useless now -- Klaus decides to spare him because he can't fend for himself here in the hostile wilderness of the living.

"That was Jeremy's theory, too," he says. The ghost drops the dramatics of his _are-you-serious-how-dare-you_ hand and settles.

"It makes sense," continues Five. "If a cumulation of dismayed spirits embodied the same being, there wouldn't be a lot of order to its behavior."

"Whoa, whoa, what?" says Klaus. "Cumulation? Who said anything about a cumulation?" The word is awkward to say, its consonants sticking as they echo the wrong way in his sinuses.

He looks to Jeremy to confirm, and the dead man, confused, tells him, "I did."

"I just assumed," says Five confidently, and Jeremy nods to confirm.

"Well, no shit I can't see it," Klaus says. "It's not actually a ghost."

"What are you talking about? Of course it's a ghost, what else could it be?"

"No, I mean-- it's not attached to a corpse _at all,_ or even, like, an individual soul, or whatever. If it never was then it can't communicate like a-- like a person would. Those are the only ones I've ever seen."

His brothers look at him, and then at each other, like this is the first they're hearing of it. It certainly is not.

"This isn't a ghost, it's something else. So I haven't been missing anything."

Diego rains on his parade. "Sorry, bro, but yes you have," he says. "Five and I could feel the cold spots when you couldn't--"

"We already went over this," Five says to Diego, brusque but with no more impatience in his voice than usual. "He isn't feeling well; that's enough to dull his sensitivities to the dead. Beyond the ineptitude of the rest of us, apparently."

"So where does that leave us?" asks Diego.

"It leaves us nowhere. We just took a detour."

And as interesting as it is to be reminded of how easily he can get his curse to disappear simply by doing damage to his body, Klaus is ready to call it quits and thank his lucky fucking stars that the ghost he ended up paired with for this mission turned out to be not-hideous and quite the merrymaker to boot. He still hasn't asked for anything in return, which also makes him the most peculiar spirit Klaus has yet to engage with (and a little suspicious, maybe, but Klaus doesn't have the vitality in his reserves to care about that). He wonders how many others like Jeremy he might have missed over the years and tries not to think of the reasons he has for finding ways to miss them again.

"Please tell them the poltergeist did not affect any of our research," Jeremy asks of Klaus.

"Is that true?" asks Klaus. His brothers perk up. Diego is shaking his leg; maybe he wants to leave too.

"I need to get lost," replies Jeremy. It's not actually an answer, which is what makes its meaning clear as day.

"Okay, uh-huh. I get it," Klaus says. He winks at Jeremy, who's pleasantly surprised but acts like he hates it, jaw set and mouth twitching with a surprised, bouncy, voiceless huff, fondly and knowingly exasperated as he vanishes. If only the others would be so gracious.

"Klaus," Five says. "What?"

"He's seriously gone this time, guys, he's had enough of you," reports Klaus. For the better, too, because his throat is starting to hurt again. "He said the ghost had nothing to do with their research, and we should all drive home so I can go back to bed and make you read _Cosmo_ to me with your clear and healthy eyes and voice while I fall asleep. So let's go."

Five says "okay" without actually meaning it and straightens up like he's about to leave, hallelujah, hallelujah. "There's just one more spot I want to try."

Of course, leave it to Five to stomp upon the promise of a conclusion and choose to beat a dead horse instead. He's always been that way and likes to describe it as being thorough, but Klaus understands it as an inability to let things go. When someone fastens a closed case and pockets the key, Five is the first one to try and pick the lock, even if the case itself is full of nothing but stale air. It makes Klaus reconsider the concept of determination as a virtue, because Five behaves exactly like those downfallen ruminating ghosts Klaus has always tried to avoid.

All that means for now is that there's no abating his brother until he's satisfied, so Klaus leaves the chair after all, careful to lean against the armrest so he doesn't see stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> during the very beginning of the show when we first met klaus he was so energized and friendly and playful and popular and i wish they'd shown more of that instead of only making me look at what were probably the worst few days (+10 months) of his whole life. i know it's necessary for character exploration to show them in a bunch of different unpleasant situations i GUESS and maybe i am glad the show already did that so i dont have to. i just get to mind my business indulging my impenetrable and tremendous weakness for a classic troubled charmer


	9. outside {the assistance}

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kinda wish i lived in a house with a yard too but instead i rent an apartment and sometimes make far-away eye contact with my neighbors on the other side of the alley while i'm typing fanfiction. and thats all i have to say

For no reason related to the swift change in temperature and air quality it comes with, Klaus sneezes almost as soon as they enter the garden shed. Then, he sneezes again.

As usual, he's a few paces behind his brothers, who are already starting to inspect the space and will no doubt soon be rattling things around and inviting him to do the same. The building is large for what it's used for, roughly the size of a single-car garage, and its windows are so filthy that the atmosphere has dimmed enough for Klaus to wonder whether it would be worth checking to see if the single lightbulb hanging from a wooden beam on the ceiling would work if one of them wanted to flip the switch. He forgot to to close the door behind him, which might actually be a good thing because of the way it had stuck when Five yanked it open.

"Bless you," offers Diego, and Klaus isn't so sure he even knows he's saying it at this point -- he thinks Diego just hears the first sharp intake of breath and the well-wishes just chime right out of him like a shopkeeper's bell responding to an opening door.

"Thank you," Klaus says. It's sweet of Diego to keep up with his manners anyway, even though at this point there are times when he he wouldn't mind being left to sneeze in peace. Still, it's nice to be acknowledged and he's used to waiting a beat afterward to address somebody anyway, which makes the whole process a bit longer but isn't a calamity, Klaus supposes, just before he has to sneeze a third time.

"Bless you," Diego says again, communicative and pointed as he stares at the state of the workspace, tools and furniture and assorted inventory all coated in dust and grime and probably some sort of mold, too, considering the cushioned quality of the dirt below them and soaked appearance of the wooden planks lining the back wall.

"Thanks. I'm fine," Klaus says. He knows what Diego's thinking, and he's being dramatic. Most people get irritated by all sorts of powders and feathery grit in one way or another, so feeling moderately itchy after being around a lot of it is more or less to be expected.

That isn't what this is, though, because if it were then he'd be feeling at least a morsel of letup after every sneeze or three even if the urge were to bloom back to the threshold just a few seconds afterward. And although sneezing lately doesn't seem to be accomplishing much of anything other than getting in the way every once in a while, it isn't painful or imperative to try and stave off, unlike the nature of the effects of his tenacious cough. His nose and lungs do, however, seem to be taking a page from each other's books in that all it takes is an arbitrary breath or misdirected particle of literally anything existing in the air at all to set either one of them off -- sometimes even the air itself, it seems -- and very little predictability on how to stop them. He isn't going to miss the sensitivity.

He trembles a hand near his face to deal with the brief but excruciating wait for his body to unclasp a fourth sneeze, which comes with an impression of finality to it and a lightheaded and faint buzz that replaces what had been an urgent, widespread tingling. Jesus, it's about time. Even while he's sick, despite their waxing and waning frequency, they usually don't go past four in a row.

"Bless," Diego says, nice and offhanded just like before, and he doesn't seem to expect a response because he follows up by asking Five, "What the hell are you looking for in here?"

Five, who looks magnificently out of place in the ramshackle wooden shelter with his determination and schoolboy uniform, kicks at something metal and acts like it doesn't hurt his foot. With his eyes fixed and jaw set, Five frowns, bends down and says, "Shit. It's hollow."

"Okay…?" prompts Diego insistently as he makes his way over to peer down too. He really hates not knowing things.

"Warner mentioned enjoying gardening as a hobby in one of his letters," Five explains with a sigh. "It was about as personal as he ever got."

When does Five have the time to go through all of this stuff? Between traversing through Dad's things -- the fun commodities, at least, not all the anthologies Five is so hopelessly in love with -- with the rest of them and trying to negotiate his way into an honorary doctorate from Cambridge _and_ doing _whatever_ he does outside of the house (Klaus has asked, Five won't tell), you wouldn't think he'd be available to absorb an entire library of uselessness. Yet, somehow, the guy manages. And he'll go right back to managing as soon as they get back, Klaus is sure of it, because they're not about to find nothing but wasted time and pollution in the backyard garden shed.

"So, what, you think it was code for something else he was up to?" guesses Diego anyway. He seems hesitant to touch anything, so he just sort of stands there and stares at everything like it could anthropomorphize at any second and try to fight him.

"Maybe," says Five. He stands back up and carefully circles a little table with an empty clouded glass vase on top of it. It's clear enough for him to see what's inside of it, which is air and dirt and nothing. "He didn't actually have a lot of projects, but I'm wondering if he ever did any sort of private work in here, away from his team."

"How do you know this stuff is his and not the other family's?" asks Klaus. He's sniffling, he suddenly realizes, but he's fresh out of supplies so it looks like they're all just going to have to deal with that after all. Too bad.

"I don't," answers Five. "But it's worth checking while we're here to see if we find something. It doesn't seem like anything on the property was cleaned out very well."

"Or at all," Diego says. "I don't think any of this was touched by the old family. It seems like half a decade's worth of build-up."

"Did anybody ever work on any of these with him?" asks Klaus. Aside from the box Five had kicked, there's nothing on the floor on that side for him to pursue aside from the legs of a few tables and an empty flower pot that looks like it would crumble instantly if you tapped it with your index finger. "It seems pretty big for just one person, doesn't it?"

"Not that I know of," says Five. "Why, is anybody…?"

"Nope. Nobody's here," Klaus promises, "so don't you get any ideas."

Five is so unimpressed. Does he ever get tired of making that face?

"What about this?" Diego kicks and gestures at an unfinished contraption nestled against the wall between an un-sanded shelf and chipped blue wagon missing one of its wheels. The top half looks like an old-fashioned television without the screen or dials, and the bottom half is paneled with tiny rickety drawers that he doubts could hold anything larger than a shot glass. A couple of them have been painted in black and white like a chess board, and there are menacing little red marks on most of the others.

Klaus catches Diego's eyes easily and nods toward the thing. "Ooh, yeah," he says approvingly, and then, "Hey. Dare you to open one," partly because that's what you're supposed to say to a sibling when something like this happens but also because he does want Diego to open one.

"You open one," says Diego.

Five pulls the knob of a white drawer on the far right side of the top row. The deep scraping sound of wood-on-splintered-wood resonates over the white noise of crickets and killdeer and the nimble winds outside. Klaus had one hundred percent expected it to be empty, but Five wears a thoughtful expression and reaches right inside with a cryptic precision that makes Klaus think he's just being histrionic and trying to add suspense.

"You up to date with your tetanus shot?" asks Diego, who hasn't voluntarily gotten an injection for at least eight years.

"Shut up."

"…What was he trying to do with that?" asks Klaus as he tilts his head and stares at the tiny arched spoon that Five is holding out and inspecting carefully. It had probably been a nice shiny silver at one point, but it's since rusted to an all-over umber. Aside from that, it's kind of cute.

"It's a souvenir spoon," says Five. "He was collecting them."

"How do _you_ know he was collecting them?" asks Klaus.

Five opens up another drawer without breaking eye contact, then he pulls out a second spoon. Klaus can't help noting that if they're sterling silver they might sell pretty well, probably up to fifty bucks each, because no matter how much time he spends nestled in a haven of unconditional safety and shelter Klaus can't seem to wash the stickiness off of his fingers. It seems like such a waste of material, if nobody's going to use or miss any of it while it sits lonely in a wooden box. He could just take it anyway. Hopefully he'll remember to pay attention when Five sets it down.

While Five reaches into his pocket with his free hand, he says, "When Warner went on sabbatical in eighty-five, he traveled, but he didn't make any stops at home base. These were all he could fit in his suitcases as souvenirs." He reveals a travel pack of Kleenex, extends his arm toward Klaus and says, "Here."

"You were hoarding this the entire time?" Klaus asks, but he takes it from Five's hand regardless because what an absolute godsend that is.

"I wasn't hoarding," says Five. "You never asked."

"Oh, well, then, Number Five," Klaus says as he encases one of them around his nose, "how kind of you to wear these on your person all day long, to bring them all this way just for me."

"I brought them for all of us," Five corrects.

"You and your big bleeding fifty-eight year old heart," continues Klaus, then he blows his nose (which feels just wonderful) while Five rolls his eyes and reaches for another drawer.

It's empty. Five pushes it shut and tries again.

"He brought back more than this," Five continues very pointedly, "so I'm wondering what he did with the rest of them, if he only kept what was significant."

Klaus, whose head has just become so light it just might float right off into the sky, asks, "Why was he traveling in the first place?"

"I don't know," says Five, but unlike before, he sounds kind of frustrated with the admission. "That's one of the things I was hoping you'd be able to ask him."

"Maybe he just needed a break," says Diego. "That guy upstairs was exhausting."

"Aw," muses Klaus, overlapping with Diego to snatch some space in the conversation. "Miss him already."

"…I'd need a vacation too after having to deal with him every day," Diego finishes.

Reminiscing over the good old twenty minutes ago prompts Klaus to peer up at the house through one of the shed's dirt-cloud windows and stretch out their evening when he freezes, taps on Diego's arm, and says, "Hey."

"What--"

"Did either of you leave annnyyy… lights on?"

Klaus annotates quickly because they're taking too long to look, and draws out the word because he knows what he's saying is weird. What he's seeing is weird. It's not like an on-and-off strobelight style frantic flickering of yellow to dim to yellow like it would be if it were operating as a threat or even a malfunction; it's slow and intentional, confined to a single round window near the top of the house and without any chaos or rhythm to it at all.

Diego is the first to leave the shed, but Five stands in front of him once he makes it out onto the grass. Klaus isn't in so much of a hurry because, one, he has to wait a second before everyone leaves so he can privately slip Warner's spoons into his heartily nourished pockets; two, he doesn't have the energy to hurry anywhere, destination outstanding; and three, he isn't very jazzed at the idea of having to go back into the house and giving Five the ammunition to keep him trapped in there playing soothsayer go-between for another couple of hours. He is so tired and his head is already beginning to feel tight again.

"Shit," Five says, and he blinks himself back into the shed. Diego, arms crossed and affect confused, doesn't go after him. Klaus does him one better and leans back against the outside wall of the shelter near the door because he's had just about enough of holding himself upright and leaning back just feels more reasonable. The wood paneling of the building's exterior is damp, of course, which means he's going to be uncomfortable with earthy rainwater seeping through the side of his sweater just as soon as he moves off of it, but comfort doesn't always come without sacrifices.

The skinny piece of white chalk Five carries when he emerges turns out to be a lost cause because, naturally, it doesn't leave a mark on that same soggy timber when Five tests it. He sighs, frustrated, and zaps back inside before coming out _again_ with the metal toolbox that had disappointed him so greatly before. He sets it on the ground and squats down in front of it, hovering over the doughy soil as he concentrates on the light show up above. Klaus can't help cringing at the awful rusty screech Five keeps spawning as he drags the chalk along the thin metal, scratching the case with his mark like a signature for whoever finds it next.

"It's morse code," Diego realizes. Klaus shrugs, nods, and lets himself cough during the intermission. He's grateful for the wall, moist as it may be, because his chest gets away from him for a second and he may have lost his balance otherwise.

The fresh air is helping a little. Giving into the cough doesn't hurt as much as it did before, but Klaus still doesn't appreciate having the wind knocked out of him while he's minding his business and leaning stationary.

"Ouch," Diego says.

"Yeah," Klaus replies. That's really all there is to say about it.

A moment passes, and then Five taps against the metal in time with the lights inside for two cycles. He's deciphered the message. Klaus thinks that maybe it should be a celebratory realization, but all he feels is a sense of weariness and dread.

"We've got to go back inside," Five says, and that's annoying news, expected or not. He marches forward, which of course means Klaus and Diego have to go back in after him. What luck!

Klaus tries something anyway: "How about you guys--" his chest twitches and he coughs, just twice, don't you dare, and he talks through it to assert himself against his bully of a respiratory system, "--go in without me. I'm done with the house, I think I'll just wait out here this time."

Five, the bastard, doesn't even break his stride to veto him. All he says is, "No. Absolutely not."

Klaus sighs -- and makes sure they can hear him -- as he pulls the upper half of his back off of the dilapidated garden shed. He can feel the chill against the subsequent clamminess of his shoulder blades.

"And you shouldn't be standing out here in the cold," adds Diego.

"You guys _brought me_ into the cold," Klaus reminds him. They keep acting like he's doing all of this stuff to make his cold worse despite being the ones to uproot him from the warm and comfortable safety of the nest he'd made for himself in his bed (and on the couch, and on the other couch, and on one of the chairs in the sitting room, and at the far end of the table in the basement) in the first place. Jeremy was fun but there was really no reason for it, and now Klaus has got several hours worth of action behind him to recover from in addition to all the prickling heaviness in his head. So he can do whatever he wants.

"Okay, but," Diego says, "you're the only one shivering right now, so you don't have much of a case for arguing."

"What? No I'm not." Is he?

"Yeah, you are," Diego says. Well, whatever.

Five has already teleported back into the house and unlocked the back door by the time they catch up to him. Stepping inside feels weird, just like it had the first time, and not in that way people always talk about when they say they can _sense_ when a place is haunted. That's not what this is. Aside from the transition from fresh to musty air, the compound of atmospheres collected in the foyer tell him that there's a bizarre discrepancy between some of the rooms, like the heat of the furnace isn't quite reaching them all. But the freaky thing is that it doesn't have a streamline; he'd encountered plenty of wet and drafty rooms between two warm and dry ones, sometimes without a door in between them, which makes absolutely no sense.

The bearing of the hallway Five sweeps through is plenty dry.

"What are you doing?" asks Diego as he begins to follow him. Klaus shuts the door and the gust of air it generates briefly knocks into him. "We should be going upstairs."

"No," Five says. "The lights were spelling out the word 'parlor'."

Parlor. "The room in the front?" Klaus asks. He barely remembers being in there because his nose had been hellbent on intrusively hassling him at the time.

"Yes," Five says. "You both stayed there after I left. Did either of you see anything interesting?"

Diego shrugs and says, "No, it was pretty empty."

"I don't remember," Klaus tells him. "Diego's probably right."

"You don't remember?" asks Five when they reach the front of the house.

"I was busy being assaulted by my ailing body," Klaus says while he watches Five step on the carpet in the parlor with his sodden shoes. Christ. "You can't expect me to give you my presence _and_ my attention today. Don't pretend you didn't know what you were in for."

Five quits the conversation, his focus concentrated on scrutinizing the room and then tearing it apart just like he had with the pantry. He starts by removing books from the shelf and then just leaving them on the floor, but that's as far as everybody else is willing to let him go.

"Hey, hey, hey," Diego says, rushing over to the shelf to do damage control.

Klaus feels like he should say something too, like 'whoa, take it easy' or 'show some respect' or some other waste of a demand, but truth be told, he doesn't really care too much about that. His main concern, really, is that it just seems unprofessional and maybe Five should start learning how to actually set things down, even when he doesn't particularly care about them. He's very sloppy for someone so meticulous, but Klaus doesn't think it's entirely his fault.

He is kind of an asshole when he's got his mind set on something, though, so some of it probably is.

As he slides a couple of magazines back against the wall of the shelf, Diego says, "Will you use a little finesse, neat freak?"

Five ignores him and pulls out what looks like a faded blue composition notebook, opens it, and fervently scans the pages. His eyes sparkle with the same fire they used to get when he discovered a new teleportation trick during training, this time burning brighter and brighter as he whips through them. His body's gone taut like a rubber band that's never been snapped, and that's because it hasn't.

"How did the _both_ of you miss this?" he asks like they're supposed to know what it even is. He reaches back up to the shelf with hungry hands. "Jesus, there are at least four more of these!"

Diego abducts one of the packets that Five's already gathered under his skinny little arm and opens it himself. He crinkles one of his eyebrows and purses his lips. "This is just scribbling," he says, "and a bunch of lists. What's the draw?"

"These were Warner's daybooks," says Five and dear God is this important to him. "This is where he used to log notes in between typing out any formalities."

"What, like his diaries?" Diego translates.

"His journals," clarifies Five. "Anything he didn't put in his research or his letters is going to be in here. It's like a behind the scenes account of everything in Dad's records."

"Great. More drivel for you to mull over," says Klaus. This is never going to end. "I bet you're just thrilled."

With an excess of smugness, even for him, Five says, "I am."

"Is that it?" asks Diego as he deposits his stolen document on the top of Five's eggheaded skyscraper. "Are we done?"

Klaus can only hope so, but as far as hope's always been able to get him, it doesn't seem to be on his side today.

Before anyone can respond, the bottom desk drawer _flies_ right fucking open and almost pulls the entire table forward with it, rattling the chain of the lamp on top and hammering the wood against the drywall and glass of the window behind it. There's no breeze, no disruptive change in atmosphere, no other noises, no visible presence as far as Klaus and his aching heat-stung eyes can see. The air up until then had been entirely still. Diego and Five both look over, agitated and shocked, but Klaus is the only one who jumps.

"Fuck!" he cries breathlessly, nerves suddenly frayed like they'd been rubbed up and down with an electric wire. " _Christ,_ are you serious?"

"What?" says Five. He hurries over to the desk like a madman made up of nothing but fearless idiocy, always the risk-taker, his reckless confidence often a sturdy shield against the concern of others. "Can you see who did it?"

"No, _no,_ it's that same-- No, the actual ghosts can't do shit like that, remember?" says Klaus. Five doesn't know a single thing about them that Klaus doesn't, so his concern, this time, is completely warranted. "What are you doing? It could still be over there."

"It could be anywhere," Five argues, then he gets back on his spry thirteen-year-old haunches to look inside the drawer before reaching right inside. "You didn't look in here either?!"

Diego shrugs. "The first two were empty," he says.

Five retrieves a brown accordion folder, the kind that's printed very vaguely to resemble the ugliest marble on earth, if it even existed in the natural world. It's like minute-detailed tortoiseshell print but really, really dark, and one of its corners is threadbare, some of the covering worn out into plain, shredded white. Five doesn't even say anything, only sighs and just rolls his eyes (his favorite) and brings it back to his insipid leaden stash.

"Okay," Klaus says in his and Diego's defense, "but why would something like _that_ be in such plain sight right at the front of the home? Was it there while the last family was living here, too?"

"Doesn't matter," Five says. "We have it now. What else can you show us?"

"What makes you so sure it wants to help us?" asks Diego.

Very cautiously, slowly, Klaus says, "It didn't. It wanted to lure us."

He is so, so, so careful not to make eye contact with the transparent and familiar corpse of a woman who suddenly stands behind the couch and shakes her head. She didn't want to chat before, but she'd never seemed malevolent and she still doesn't now. This other thing Klaus could never get a read on. Five doesn't have any good reason to trust it so much.

"We have to go," he continues. "Uh, for real, like, we have to go."

Five is taking him seriously, at least, his heedful expression rightfully furnished with waiting alarm. Still, he asks, "Why? What's going on?"

If Klaus says he doesn't exactly know that himself, then Five might make them stay. He's kept good on his promise not to make Klaus use his powers, but his understanding of the room is making the situation seem a lot more dire than his brothers realize, and in a few minutes he might not have a choice. He isn't even sure what he _could_ do, but he knows the only one here capable of making any sort of difference at all if anything were to escalate.

"I'll tell you in a minute. Okay? But we have to--"

A pen plummets off of the desk point-side-down, bleeding ink and stabbing the carpet. Diego instantly reaches for one of his blades.

"You're not going to _slice up_ a quintessence," Klaus tells him. "Come on. Come on, come on."

Diego takes over, thank goodness, because playing leader and trying to corral people had been an exhausting forty seconds to top off an exhausting four hours. He ushers Klaus off toward the front door and grabs half of Five's crudely gleaned documents and tells him, "Let's go," to drive the point home in case he's still thinking of staying.

As a symbol of his reciprocity and trust, Five is surprisingly compliant and doesn't burn daylight by rocking the boat. As he stiffly retreats alongside his brothers, he dutifully grabs the rest of his harvest and doesn't look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my fav thing about klaus in these types of things is that he will complain and complain and complain and refuse and complain and make sure you know how terrible he feels and how upset he is but then half the time when someone catches him off guard and asks him how he's doing he's like oh i'm fine. what? i'm fine. you're being so dramatic i'm fine.


	10. sitting room: |the repose|

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry for being unprofessional and making the chit chat finale so LONG! i had this ready to go a while ago but i wanted to upload a bunch of other little stories first to bulk up my repertoire, and then i got carried away writing and posting new ones and just generally procrastinating. i also must admit i just wasn't ready to say goodbye to this one! but as they say, all good things must etc 
> 
> well, da da da daaaa…!

When Vanya's brothers return, Diego is carrying two giant stapled paper bags, Five is carrying a briefcase and an armful of journals, and Klaus is carrying the weight of a day-long excursion with a bad cold and no medicine to help soften its edges. 

"Hey," she says as they enter the sitting room. "How did it go?"

She shuts the lid of the box of dark silk neckties she's been going through and stands up to take a considerate armful of whatever Five is carrying. She doesn't buckle with the burden of its weight -- she knows how heavy a stack of papers can be -- but Five bobs back up just a little, still not entirely used to some of the details of his new-old body. He nods toward the bar, so Vanya makes her way over to set them down on the counter.

"We had to make a speedy getaway," says Diego, who may not have given her an update at all if they'd run into each other one-on-one. The two of them still mostly only interact in groups, but Vanya’s glad he’s venting to her now, at least. Things have been fine for a little while now. "There's some freaky shit going on in that house."

"What happened?" asks Vanya as Diego follows her, his stride even, sets the bags down and then opens them without ripping the paper. Steam swirls up out of them immediately and she can't help peering inside. "Is this Indian?"

"My idea," says Klaus, who's still sounding dreadful. He's barely able to dig his voice out from underneath the heap of congestion that's been crowding him for days, and the quiet roughness of his normally clear tenor tells her that his throat must still be killing him. She turns around to see that he's already taken up residence on his favorite couch, only his hand visible to her as he waves it in the air. He drops it and then Vanya hears a thick sniffle from his direction before he continues speaking. "Couldn't find your girlfriend, though. I know she's out there, Vanya, I know there's somebody in Little India you want me to meet."

Vanya smiles and pushes Five's collection to the far end of the counter, away from everything else, with the intention of studying parts of it later. "There's nobody," she repeats to Klaus, probably for the fifteenth time this week. Then, as she helps Diego unpack their food, she also repeats, "What happened at the house?"

"Well, for one," says Five, also on his way toward the bar counter, "there were four ghosts. And none of them were Warner."

"None of them?" asks Vanya. Five grabs a plate and starts loading basmati rice and lamb vindaloo onto it before Diego and Vanya have even finished taking everything else out of the bags they came in.

Five sits on the stool closest to his stash and begins to eat, then reaches over Vanya's arm and grabs a piece of paratha as soon as Diego sets the carton down. After swallowing a mouthful of rice, Five says, "No, none of them. Two of his assistants were there, but we could only communicate with one."

"The guy was a real headache, too," adds Diego.

"I don't understand what you guys didn't like about him," says Klaus. "Ben hated him too. Hey -- Oh, hey, Diego, could you bring me a plate? Just put like, everything on it."

" _Ben_ was there?" is Diego's only response, but then he delivers the last of the takeout containers onto the counter and presumably starts to follow through with Klaus' request. He's so obviously conscious-stricken about having taken part in a mission that tore his sick brother from his bed for the day that Klaus could probably get him to broodingly move mountains for him if he asked. Vanya wonders if Klaus knows that.

"Uh, yes Ben was there," says Klaus. 

" _When?_ You never said anything," says Five.

"You know Ben is still around sometimes when I'm not talking to him, right?" says Klaus. 

"You gave literally no indication that he was with us."

"Yeah, he showed up when we went upst… Oh. No, he was there in the-- Wow, since the _kitchen,_ were you really?"

"Hi, Ben," says Vanya. 

"Yep. Uh-huh. He says hello."

"Did he stick around the entire time after that?" asks Diego.

"No," Klaus says. "No, no way. He was there while we talked to Jeremy for a little while and then got fed up with him and left to go and look at the rest of the bedrooms. Ben called him nettling, but I don't get why. He was so _cool,_ right? He was so much fun."

"How was he fun? He _was_ nettling," says Diego.

"Yeah, whatever, Diego, you didn't even actually know him," says Klaus.

"But _Ben_ knew him," argues Diego, "and he agrees with me. How hungry are you?"

"Uh… Not very."

"But you wanted one of everything?"

"Yeah, just load it up and if I can't finish it then someone else…" Klaus stops and frowns thoughtfully. "Oh, I guess not, you'd probably get sick if you ate off of my plate. Well, hmm, I guess that's fine," he decides for them, "I guess you can risk it."

Vanya finishes assembling her own serving and moves to sit at the other end of the bar, leaving one stool in the middle for Diego, so she can see Klaus as she swivels to the side. He looks across the room and and shrugs about something. It's either Ben or he's getting a little delirious from a potentially climbing fever, Vanya thinks, then she feels a twinge of shame and reprimands herself for not trusting in his lucidity and forgetting that Klaus can't turn his powers off. She bends her knees so she can use the footrest as she balances the plate on her lap and remembers to be careful.

The food is plenty hot, and Vanya notices that while Five remains composed as he continues with his meal, his cheeks are developing a glow and his eyes are becoming glassy. Although his taste is hardly discerning after his time away, the length of it in addition to the reduced age of his new body seems to have rendered him with a much lower spice tolerance than that of the rest of them. He isn't going to acknowledge it, but Vanya passes him a napkin anyway, then sets one in front of Diego's spot so Five doesn't feel singled out.

Diego doesn't bother with precision as he ladles portions from each of the four dishes onto a high-rimmed dinner plate, the assortment of spiced steam mingling as it all clouds up in front of his chest and wafts all the way up to the middle of his chin. In response to Klaus' disputable problem-solving, he says, "Or… you could just eat it later."

"Oh, yeah. I guess so," Klaus says hurriedly, then he sneezes with a modest vocalization that makes it sound like he's personally irritated by it. He very well could be. No doubt he's been doing that all day; it's been his standard for nearly half a week now.

Reflexively, Vanya pauses with her fork in the air and says, "Bless you." Her voice overlaps with Diego's, and he parrots himself when Klaus sneezes again not even two seconds later and then _again_ emphatically after the third time, which in her opinion is verging on overkill. Vanya is surprised when Klaus doesn't groan or complain when he's done and act as though it's the first time he's ever in his life sneezed more than twice in a row (it's not -- she heard him down the hall just before the group had walked into the room and joined her).

"Thanks, thanks, thank you, everyone," he says instead. Vanya's surprise vanishes. "You know, I'm actually starting to love all this attention. Maybe I'll just keep sneezing forever."

He says it like it’s a choice. Diego shakes his head as he tops off the plate with a strip of naan. 

"It's a novelty right now," he says. "We'd get tired of hearing you eventually and it'd just become background noise."

"Wooooow," replies Klaus. "How about 'get well soon'?"

"Get well soon so we won't be listening to your cold all day long for the rest of our lives."

"I think you love it. You would get bored without me here to liven things up."

Klaus makes Diego wait when he approaches him with his food, kicking out the tissue box he's got stored beneath the high-legged couch he's been camping on for the past few days. He bends down and pulls up a couple of sheets, then turns the upper half of his body away from the group and blows his nose.

"Sorry," he says in acknowledgement when he's done, then he takes the plate from Diego's hands. "Thanks."

When Diego returns to the bar to finally help himself, Five is almost done eating and already has his eyes on some of the documents he's brought home. The one he picks up is ambitious; a wire bound leather journal with tabbed-off sections and yellowing paper, some of them loose and sticking out of the sides to create an uneven edge all around. It isn't more than a few decades old, but it's worn out enough for Vanya to worry about it falling apart, even under the care of Five's tactful dexterity.

"You're not actually about to read those now, are you?" asks Diego. He goes light on the rice and bread and skips the chicken tikka.

Steadily, Five says, "Why not?"

"I'm interested," adds Vanya in support. They've stretched the information in Dad's journals as far as it could take them, and unlike the others, Vanya has never been given any sort of insight on the way her powers work. A new lead like this is exciting, even with the chance that it might not take them anywhere. It at least checks an option off their list.

"Better watch where you open them," says Klaus. It's hard to tell whether his solemnity is coming from a sincere place or simply borne of exhaustion. "You don't want to unleash a poltergeist in here. This room is _huge,_ so just take a second to imagine the havoc."

"Unleash a what?" asks Vanya.

Five lowers the book, holding it horizontally with both hands. "What do you mean?" he asks. It’s not often that he poses a question with so much humility, lacking in any sort of guard or sharpness to protect the impression of his tone. "Can that happen?"

Klaus just stares at him, thick eyebrows raised, challenging, his eyes communicating something that Vanya can't quite read. Even Five's impeccable scrutiny takes a few moments to do its job. 

Eventually, Five's eyes open back up all the way and his features unravel from their picture of pinched concentration to one of exasperated displeasure. "Klaus," he says, as though his brother's name itself is a threat, and Vanya knows by now that the heat in his voice is exactly the reward Klaus was soliciting.

Klaus relaxes back against the wall of pillows on the couch.

"If you weren't so serious all the time, it wouldn't be so easy to do that to you," he says as Five huffs and starts to gingerly flip through the journal. "This is like, _the_ only time I get to know more about something than you do."

"For good reason, if you're going to abuse your power like that," says Five. He doesn't seem as upset as most people would while referencing an abuse of power.

"Did you say poltergeist?" steers Vanya anyway, knowingly playing preemptive peacekeeper. She's used to it. "As in the movie?"

"That is _exactly_ what I--" Klaus becomes too excited and raises his voice, which anyone else would have remembered not to do by now, and coughs a couple of times in reparation, more from his throat than from his chest. "Ohhh bad idea. Okay." But he clears his throat and he’s fine. "Vanya, that's exactly what I said."

"Wasn't anything like the movie," Diego comments while he inattentively mixes the jalfrezi vegetables around on his plate.

Vanya nods and says, "I haven't seen it."

Klaus smiles at her to display his solidarity and says, "Me neither."

"So, then, what did it…?" prompts Vanya.

"Uh, it was really confusing," says Klaus. "And annoying. Real fickle thing, and it kept wanting to hold my hand."

"Oh, your tattoo? Like it was saying 'hello'?" asks Vanya.

"Wow," Klaus says to Diego only, because Five's head is down, his own focus too loud in his head for him to hear a peep from the rest of them. "How long did it take _you guys_ to figure that out? She got it right away." He holds up his right hand, wiggling his fingers and flexing them. "You’re too right, Vanya. So astute."

"How did you realize that?" asks Vanya. She maintains a modest affect, but it's nice to have someone else tell her brothers that she won over them at something.

" _I_ didn't," says Klaus. "I, um, couldn't feel it. Diego and Five felt these cold spots on my hands, but for some reason I was immune to that one. They said it was because I'm sick right now, but I don't know."

"Do you mean, like… because of your fever?"

"Yeah, maybe."

"It isn't very high, Klaus. I don't think that was it either."

"Yeah. Yeah! I don't think so, but I don't know. It wasn't a normal ghost, you know, it was moving things around, it was pushing people--"

"Not us," interjects Diego. "It didn't touch any of us."

"No, not-- _Wait,_ actually, _yes_ us, Diego, it touched me plenty. And so did everyone else. You were all over me, couldn't keep your heavy mitts off."

"Why, to check his temperature?" Vanya asks Diego.

"Sometimes," Diego says. "That was how we figured out it was there in the first place. Then we had to keep checking."

"How do you feel now, are you still warm?" she asks Klaus next, momentarily sidetracked. Vanya can't help it; she's gotten caught in the habit lately.

"Sometimes, unless I'm cold."

"Never anywhere in the middle?"

"Nah," Klaus says. He seems so okay with that part. "All or nothing, baby."

Just like before. That's okay. Sometimes colds get worse or have a short period of stagnancy like this one before they start to get better.

"Okay," Vanya says. "Well… moving things around, that's threatening, isn't it? Did the poltergeist do anything else?"

" _Yes,_ " says Klaus emphatically. "Oh yes. Yes, listen to this one, Vanya. In the end, after we'd gone outside, it flickered all these lights to lure us back in. No-- Not us, just Five. Everyone else was so over it. I was. Diego?"

Diego shrugs and swallows, looking up at Klaus as he bends his head down to wipe his mouth with a brown paper napkin. He returns his posture to baseline and says, "Yeah, I was ready to go."

"Yes, so, just Five. It just lured Five, our weakest link. Terrible liability. It knew what he wanted. It brought him to this room that had all of the… all of that," he points at Five's stack of papers, "and then it started getting kind of super violent, it opened this drawer really fast and threw a pen down at us, and this other ghost was like, _'you have to leave',_ so I--"

"Whoa. Klaus." Diego holds up a hand, voice calm and muscles stiff. "What do you mean? What other ghost?"

"Oh, yeah, that first one, the lady," Klaus says. Vanya pays him extra heed, confused, quickly trying to work through the information. All of the women who worked for Warner are still alive, unless he's talking about Miss Foster. "She popped up when Five was running over to the desk."

"Shit, are you serious?"

"She wasn't menacing, though, she was one of the good guys." 

"How do you know that?"

"I just know."

"So… why didn't you tell us that was going on?"

"It was kind of urgent," Klaus says. "We were like, about to be attacked…? _And_ I was worried you'd try to make me talk to her. I don't think she wanted that, anyway, I think she would've just left if I tried."

Diego's frown is more sad than it is thoughtful or irritated. "No, man, we would've believed you," he says. Despite reeking of overcompensation, the lack of softness in his voice is the same as always. Vanya doesn't know who he thinks he's fooling.

Klaus isn't at all phased by Diego's tone; he seems indifferent to the predicament either way. His plate is barely half empty but he sets it on the ground, then he slides his body down so he's almost diagonal, legs stretched out straight like a sloped bridge connecting couch to carpet. It only takes him a few seconds to decide that isn't comfortable and pull his legs up until they're folded and his feet are on the couch with him. He seems to like gravitating between the two extremes, unless he's sitting somewhere inappropriate. Klaus crosses his arms over his knees, then flashes a look of confusion across the room as he tilts his head down and looks like he's taken aback. He doesn't relay whatever Ben had just said to him.

"I'm surprised Martina didn't want to talk," says Vanya to move things along. "Warner quoted her a lot, so I thought she was kind of a…" A bit of stage fright kicks in when both of them suddenly become so rapt, more so than she's ever seen them look at her outside of training, and she can't think of the word she wants to use.

She doesn't need to, it turns out, because Klaus says saves her and says, "Who?"

Vanya knows the answer to that one. "Martina Foster?"

"Yeah, Martina Foster, who's that?" asks Diego.

That must mean Five didn't know either. That's bad luck, or maybe just poor planning -- Vanya had only read a couple of his letters while Five pored over them for hours. Commiserating with him had never even occurred to her, because she'd assumed Five knew already everything about him that she did (and obviously more). Most of what she'd found out had been during the meeting in Klaus' bedroom this morning.

"I'm not really sure," confesses Vanya, "but he referenced her in almost all of the letters I read. She didn't work for him, so I think she must have been a friend or something. Was she…"

Vanya suspends her sentence for a moment when she notices Klaus ducking his head down to sneeze. She waits for him.

"Sorrysorrysorry," he says almost immediately after, rushing as he comes back up, "was she what?"

While he unfolds himself to reach down again and grab the tissue box -- then he sets it down on the couch cushion next to him; smart -- Vanya says, "Was she sort of older, maybe around his age? Fifties or sixties?"

"My goodness. We should've brought you with us instead of Five," says Klaus with a tissue in his hand before he brings it up to his face and just holds it there, sniffling a few times and needlessly dabbing around the underside. He tilts his head back so his voice will carry. "Hey, Superscholar, are you hearing this?"

By the grace of God (no, not really, though it feels like that's usually what it'd take), Five looks up from the journal and says, "Hm? What?"

Klaus waves a hand at her, but from him, for some reason, it feels encouraging instead of callous like it would if almost anyone else had done it. "You go," he says, "I'm still…" and then bows his head back down to sneeze again, the tremor scrunching his shoulders.

"Bless you. Did you ever read anything about Martina Foster?" Vanya asks Five.

Five looks troubled, his brow furrowed. He doesn't even need to think about it. "No."

"She was in his… Wow, really?"

"No," Five says. He leans forward, interested, patient. "Who was she?"

"I don't know, but he referenced her a lot. He'd tell Dad the things she had to say about his research. Compliments, mostly, but she had some insight once in a while, too."

Vanya is so surprised that Five didn't know about her. 

"I'm sorry," she continues. "I thought everything I'd read would overlap with information you already had. I should have checked to compare notes with you."

"No," says Five. "It was my oversight. I'll keep my eyes peeled as I'm going through these."

"Please. I'm curious," Vanya agrees as she temporarily discards her empty plate on the counter. She glides her eyes back over to Klaus and says, "Are you done with that?"

"What? Oh, um." He looks at the floor and waves a hand at her again. "It's okay, I'll get it."

He keeps switching back and forth between asking people to wait on him and denying their help, almost like he only wants to act out, to behave like he wants it, but isn't interested in having anybody follow through. Vanya had figured that out shortly after she'd accidentally assumed a caretaking role when Klaus first started getting sick with a tell-tale sore throat. She's never been the doting type, and that hasn't changed, but she fell into the task of routinely offering him food and company both because of how miserable Klaus was acting (at first on purpose, but even more so when he thought nobody was looking), and more than anything, because she knew he'd do the same for her.

"No, it's fine," Vanya says, swinging her feet and sliding off of the stool. "I'm up anyway."

As she approaches his station, Klaus extends an arm downward as though he's trying to help by reaching for the plate to hand it to her even though it's at least two feet away from his fingertips.

"Offer still stands, if you want to polish it off," he says as Vanya bends at the knees to pick it up.

She knows he’s serious and she also knows that he isn’t expecting her to say yes. She declines by saying, "I'll just put it in the fridge for you if you want to heat it up later."

"Suit yourself," Klaus says with a rattly, pitying sigh, the kind that implies that he considers Vanya to be the unfortunate one making a mistake here. "I can't believe you don't want to catch this thing off of me. I've been trying so hard to show you all what a whale of a time it is."

He's joking, but it's really sort of true, Vanya notices, even if Klaus didn't mean it that way. Because as awful as he wants everyone to know he's feeling, Klaus has kept up the effort not to indicate that it has in any way dulled his spirit. The show probably wouldn't get past most people. Klaus is plenty transparent when he doesn’t want to be.

"Yeah, it's been a real jamboree," comments Diego, who's almost sullen about it at this point, unable to handle any and all feelings of concern and inevitably displaying his intolerance through either anger or bitterness. The illness's effect on him and his nosy and impatient tenderness may be worse than it is on Klaus himself, the person suffering through an actual symptomatic experience. Diego has always been the weirdest about Klaus not taking care of himself.

Vanya returns the fairly bountiful plate of food to the bar and starts to look for something to cover it with to keep it fresh for a few hours. Klaus, lately, has only been interested in eating just a few bites of anything in one sitting. He told Vanya that gets bored of food quickly when he can't taste it, but Vanya knows that eating something warm and spicy is a relief for the sore throat and congestion. He'll probably venture back down and find it again late at night when those same symptoms are keeping him hostage from a good night's sleep. 

After she's found a thick sheet of wax paper -- probably once used to wrap beer bottles, though Dad very rarely had a use for those -- Vanya spreads it out and is halfway through wrapping it when Five breaks the silence in the room by raising his head and saying, "Klaus, Jeremy Rice was lying to you." 

Klaus gasps very delicately, finally mindful of his testy lungs, and presses a hand to his chest. "He wouldn't!"

"You barely knew him. Of course he would." 

"What makes you think so?" asks Diego.

Vanya doesn't bother asking who Jeremy Rice is. She'll either find out now or later when she reads through Five's leftovers.

"He and Wilson weren't friends," Five says. "They couldn't stand each other; that's why Warner had to keep them separated."

"Oh!" Klaus laughs, fluttery and short and delighted. "Oh, yeah! Okay. Wow, that makes so much sense."

Five squints. "What are you talking about?" he asks. "You said he told you they were close."

"Well," Klaus says, "…Well, so, _I_ was just trying to guess. He wouldn't tell me shit about Wilson, he got _so_ weird about him, but he reacted the same way to all of my suggestions. Really cagey. Friends, frats, lovers-- Huh. You know, I never even thought to guess that they could be enemies. Or was it more like _rivals?_ That could be romantic. Does it say?" 

"It doesn't have to be romantic," says Diego.

"Agree to disagree."

"Right now I'm looking at his decision to assign them to different projects," Five clarifies. "They couldn't go five minutes without arguing, and it was wasting too much time."

"Did he say what they argued about?" asks Diego. He's done eating now, too, but he doesn't get up yet. "Just curious."

"No, he didn't," answers Five. "Not in this report, at least. I suppose it isn't relevant to us -- I only brought it up because I thought it meant Rice could have been dishonest about other components of his time working for Warner, too." He huffs an ironic sigh. "Turns out Klaus was the unreliable narrator we should have been watching out for." 

"Vanya, Jeremy was a real party animal," says Klaus, paying no heed to Five's accusation. "Maybe _you_ would have liked him."

"You're the only one who likes him," says Diego.

"He was the best," says Klaus. "Shame about him and Wilson, isn't it? I was really-- I was really rooting for them." Distracted, he shifts on the couch and says, "Hey?"

Five looks back up at the group when he realizes he's being addressed.

"Stop being quiet. What do you see?" asks Klaus.

"I thought you didn't care about any of this," he says with a flat smile.

"I care about that _face_ you just started making, Number Five, so what's the story?"

"Well," says Five, his smile resilient, tilting crooked and cocky, "I just found Martina Foster."

"Really!" Her, too. That fast. Five really is well-practiced. "And?"

"Just her name so far," Five says, but he's already flipping through the pages. "But I think this book might give us some clues as to…"

He stops, his eyes scanning along the page he's just opened to, the book now flat on the counter and Five's arms stretched out, hands on the edges of the bar. The rest of them hang in the silence he's created and wait for an update.

"I don't believe this," he finally says. He sounds displeased, but he doesn't elaborate, head still bowed as he resumes exploring the journal.

Diego raises his eyebrows expectantly, gaze wide and impatient. "You want to share with the class?"

Five sighs. Diego's attention is locked on him, but when Vanya turns to Klaus, he meets her eyes readily and grins at her like he's trying to get her excited.

"It looks like Martina Foster was Warner's mistress."

Five says it matter-of-factly, as though it's just another humdrum piece of information, like Warner's address or the number of years since he vacated the house. They've all learned (and un-learned, and re-learned, and tried to forget and then learned again) to read each other's bearings by now, and while the versatility of his eloquence is impressive, he should know he's not going to get away with trying to pass it off as something so unremarkable. Not with a crowd like this.

"No way," says Klaus, beaming, right on cue. He looks at Vanya, then at the empty space next to him. Even while he’s fighting something terrible, the playful light in his eyes shows up just as explicit and authentic as always. He gives a soft falsetto cheer, the kind he likes to do when he's healthy anyway and a regular cheer wouldn't scrape up his throat. "Warner _did_ have a romance he was holding over Dad, you guys. Oh my God, how crazy is that? Right?"

"Wait. I don't know about that," says Five. "This passage makes it look secretive. It says he could only invite her up after dark when the day shift workers had gone home. I'm not so sure Dad knew that was what it was."

Vanya says, "No, he knew." She's sure of it now. "In that context, it almost seemed like Warner was gloating, talking about how much he impressed her and how interested she was in his work."

"Why would Dad care, though?" asks Diego. "He clearly wasn't interested in romantic love."

"Or any kind of love," adds Klaus.

"Maybe he was bragging about having escaped the lonely, shitty, heartless lifestyle Dad was trying to impose on him," Diego suggests.

"Yeah! Kind of like, you know, 'ha-ha, I have a life now, I'm normal, I can feel all of my human emotions, I'm functioning as a part of society, take that, Reggie, I sure showed you'," says Klaus. "Like none of us could ever do. Well, except for Vanya, I guess. You integrated just fine."

Not really, Vanya thinks, but she smiles tightly for his sake and says, "Thanks."

"That would make sense," says Five. "But he must have known it wouldn't have bothered Dad."

"He was probably just doing it for his own satisfaction," says Diego. "Just to make sure he knew, shove it in his face a little."

"I bet that felt _soooo_ good," says Klaus.

"He must have been keeping it a secret from everyone else, then," wagers Five, "if Rice didn't know about it."

Klaus smiles wistfully. "He _did_ say there was a lovely lady," he recalls. "I just thought that was part of our gag, though. Wow, what if forbidden love really was the reason Vincent broke away? What a brave, brave man."

"I doubt that was the whole reason," says Five.

"I am interested now. Five, keep me updated," Klaus says. He's so good at ignoring people while they're trying to quench his ideas. "But only on that part. I'm just _dyyyying_ to know what happens. What else does it say about his secret life?"

Vanya doesn't know what she expected from Klaus once the group returned from their excursion, but he's caught her off guard this evening. She remembers how when the rest of them came back from missions as kids, if there wasn't a need for him to stick around and try to help take care of his siblings in the aftermath, Klaus would either radiate a grandiose version of his characteristic flouncy energy or he'd deflate on his way to his room before shutting the door to stew in his own exhaustion. They didn't get close enough to each other back then for Vanya to dust off a reason for either response.

What happened today is kind of like that, with the added elements of familial baggage and reunification all that comes with them, along with the blossoming utility of Klaus' powers and the way that interacts with his already being so reluctant and unwell. Maybe she'd just expected him to have changed at all, at least in energy or attitude or even in illness in one direction or another, but Klaus, with as many hats as he's capable of wearing, seems to have come back exactly as he'd left.

And, just as he was yesterday, Klaus is prone to wilting after he's been given the opportunity to physically relax and simultaneously burn himself out via active participation in the sensibilities of the room. It makes sense that pushing his commentary into every corner of a conversation he can fit himself into (and some that he can't but tries to anyway) would wear him out harder than a static activity like a book or a movie or a sketchpad would. The mind and the body are intricately connected, after all, and it makes sense that putting forth a demanding flood of mental effort would leave Klaus to feel it in his bones.

He isn't saying so right now, but Vanya can tell that's where he's close to ending up.

"No secret life, sorry to disappoint," Five says flatly. "The rest of this is mostly trial and error notations assessing protein expression."

"Oh no, Jesus that's boring," says Klaus. "Well, good luck staying awake. Do you guys think we should send a message to the family?"

"What?"

"To warn them? About the unpredictable spirit doing _parkour_ all over their living room?" 

He leans forward on the couch and clears his throat while the rest of them deal with the whiplash. The way Klaus changes a subject is so seamless that it sounds like his new topic is part of the conversation that was already happening, and it can take everybody else a second to catch up when he does it. Vanya sometimes thinks that his mind tends toward doing two or three things at once and he gets them mixed up, or maybe it's going too quickly and he skips the transitional step in navigating a conversation. That, or Ben gave him the idea.

"No," says Five neutrally as though he hadn't been caught off guard. "I doubt there's a need. Some people buy supposedly haunted houses on purpose. I'm sure they know what they're getting into."

It's hard to tell whether Klaus' responsive shudder comes from disapproval of the concept or the draft in the room giving him a chill. "Well, ugh, hope they enjoy. Better them than me. Maybe their ghosts will get off my back."

"They could." 

"You're not sticking around?" asks Diego as Klaus stretches and slowly shoves himself off of the couch. Spending the entire day watching Klaus battle the sniffles has no doubt gotten Diego concerned enough to want to keep an eye on him. Vanya doesn't know him very well and even she can see it.

"Uh, do you need me for anything?" asks Klaus. The inquiry is genuine if not swirled with a whisper of bitterness. "Or am I dismissed?" 

"You're dismissed," says Five, and just because he doesn't look up from his task doesn't make it look any less like he's finally playing along. "Hope you feel better."

"Oh, uh-huh, yeah, don't worry about…" Klaus needs to clear his throat again, fist halfway up to his mouth before he folds at the waist to cough, rough and congested. "Wow, you guys hear that? Christ." He rubs his chest like it's just been scuffed and he's trying to smooth it out. "Well, if that isn't my cue…"

"Jesus, Klaus," Vanya comments. She wishes they could give him something more than chamomile tea and menthol candies to rescue him from all of that.

As he heads toward the corridor on mercifully steady feet, Klaus says, "I'm going to see if I can get the the bathtub to transform into a saucepan and boil myself alive. Don't wait up."

"We will," Vanya promises, used to the dialogue. It's what he wants to hear. "See you in a few hours."

"Send Five up to my room only," demands Klaus correctively, squeezing out what looks like the last of his energy by spinning around to address them and walking a few paces backwards, a risky maneuver for somebody with his sense of balance and the amount of fuzz in his head. He stalls. "I heard the kid owes me a favor."

"Get some rest, Klaus."

As Five moves his eyes up from the successful dawn of his undertaking, Vanya studies his face and expectantly gauges whether he plans to follow through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> klaus: enjoy being in my debt forever, asshole  
> five: why did you lie to me about jeremy rice


End file.
